[aoeusnth1]

Fair enough about your motivation, however you also to further in saying that the best way to achieve and exceed human intelligence is to first understand it. That didn't pan out for chess, it hasn't contributed much to our current SOTA approaches to many other problems where LLMs are king, and I'm not sure why neuroscientists are so confident in some future where their field is the key to intelligence when their track record of breakthroughs is so poor.

[Wonderfall]

I admit my phrasing was poor there, and I got too excited. I will clarify since I don't really disagree with you or what others said (claiming it's the best way is an overstatement).

Well, one could say that neural networks pioneers modeled their ideas on simplified brain structures representations. Modern neural networks have little in common with an actual biological brain, however, the inspiration remains there (even for modern NNs like CNNs). I recall the intent was there too, originally: providing a framework to study biological cognition in the 50s. Then it evolved to become a new paradigm in computer science so that we have programs able to learn and adapt for problems that are formally too complicated for deterministic solutions.