[nl]

I can't believe I'm getting down-voted just because I'm not bullish on ANN.

I don't think it's that - I think it is because you are factually wrong. In particular this part: "ANN are not that big of a deal, IMHO, when you compare them to other machine learning techniques i.e. Support Vector Machines. " is wrong.

(Deep) Neural Networks are a very, very big deal because they work so much better than SVNs in every domain where there is sufficient training data, sufficient time (and enough GPUs!) to train them.

This post is a big deal because it shows a way to cut down that training time.