[veets]

There is plenty of work running evolutionary algorithms on GPUs, but there are a number of limiting factors that make it less than ideal. Evolutionary algorithms in general can be extremely effective, they just solve very different problems from "is this a picture of a cat?" and aren't as sexy as neural networks.

In fact, much of "old school" CS is still very much alive and applying modern techniques and hardware to their problems. It's not that neural networks are some field of CS that is much more advanced than the rest of CS but rather neural networks happen to be the current hot topic.