[yvdriess]

I wouldn't say they contain any model of the world. They're a statistical predictive model, which have proven effective at certain tasks. My take is that the demoware part is not inherent to the NN approach, but rather that the tasks it's unreasonably effective produce very cool demo-able tasks for which the audience readily fills in the blanks. Cool demos make it easier to get further resources, so demoware-prone techniques tend to pull more funding, at least for a while.