I think people think back propagation is the metaphorical lift equation here and we just need a “manufacturing” advancement (ie, more compute and techniques for using it). We’re close to that (I personally feel like with poor evidence) but definitely not there yet (as evidenced by nobody publishing this). We cannot describe what is happening with modern architectures as fully as a lift equation predicts fixed wing flight, and so it is largely an intuition + trial and error, which is a slow unreliable way to make progress.
Secondarily, just because neurons are complex on technical level, it does not mean that they should be complex on logical level.
For example, in computers if you would look at the CPU structure, on a low level you have quantum effects and tunneling and very insane stuff but on a logical level you are dealing with very trivial boolean logic concepts.
I would be not be surprised in a slightest if copying and reverse engineering neurons per se would not be necessary and defining aspect of anything related to AGI.
People think maybe the missing pieces might be in the other things we don’t understand about the brain. It makes sense- it does what we want, so the answer must be in there somehow. I agree we don’t need to perfectly understand it, it just seems like a good place to keep looking for those missing pieces.
