[gary_0]

It is based on the brain, but only in the loosest possible terms; ML is a cargo cult of biology. It's kind of surprising that it works at all.

[Borg3]

It works because well, its actually pretty primitive at its core. Whole learning process is actually pretty brutal. Doing millions of interations w/ random (and semi-random) adjustments.

[Terr_]

I think I've fallen into the "it's just a very fancy kind of lossy compression" camp.

[eli_gottlieb]

Honestly once you understand maximum-likelihood estimation, empirical risk minimization, automatic differentiation, and stochastic gradient descent, it's not that much of a surprise it works.