[briga]

Cognitive scientists have been studying the computational foundations of vision in depth since at least the 1980s (see David Marr's 1982 book Vision), and AI scientists have been using neural networks for computer vision tasks for at least as long. So yeah, I'm no expert, but this probably isn't the ground-breaking work the article makes it out to be.

[kkylin]

This work is about the very early steps of the primate visual pathway -- retina to LGC to the input layer of V1. Marr's opus is meant to be a much more wholistic view of the visual system. A more appropriate context for this article is perhaps David Hubel's (very accessible) Eye, Brain, Vision.

(The book used to be freely available on a website hosted by Harvard Med, but I can't seem to find it anymore.)

FWIW, I work a little bit in computational neuroscience. While I think "ground breaking" is an exaggeration, and I wish the article spent more time explaining the general thinking in the field and why it matters, the content is not terribly written for an article of this type and length. And it should be emphasized that the point of this modeling is really understanding the biology of the primate visual system; what it says about the general problem of vision is a separate question.

Disclaimer: I was not involved in this work, but did collaborate with one of the scientists extensively in the past.

[kkylin]

Can't edit anymore, so two very minor corrections: "LGC" should have been "LGN" (had "RGC" and "LGN" both on my mind), and "disclaimer" should really have been "disclosure."