[natalyarostova]

I think part of the problem is that the upper bound on neural nets, as far as we can tell, might very well be general intelligence, and things like self-driving cars, and other nearly magical use-cases that seem within reach. Whereas tree based models, for a series of reasons, many related to scaling, don't offer that feeling of limitless potential.

[zelphirkalt]

Maybe. But then again we often try to solve very specific problems, which are very far from requiring anything close to a general intelligence. Heck, a general intelligence might even be bad at things, just like humans are not as good as computers at certain things.

[kbelder]

There's a science-fiction story somewhere in there. Imagine an alien planet where brains evolved using a structure completely different than a neural net... some sort of classification model where they were incredibly efficient inside their domain, but broke unpredictably when brought outside of it.