[atschantz]

It's worth noting that 'free energy' is just the 'evidence lower bound' that is optimized by a large portion of today's machine learning algorithms (i.e. variational auto-encoders).

It's also worth noting that 'predictive coding' - a dominant paradigm in neuroscience - is a form of free energy minimization.

Moreover, free energy minimization (as predictive coding) approximates the backpropagation algorithm [1], but in a biologically plausible fashion. In fact, most biologically plausible deep learning approaches use some form of prediction error signal, and are therefore functionally akin to predictive coding.

Which is all just to say that the notion of free energy minimization is somewhat commonplace in both neuroscience and machine learning.

[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/28333583