I don't know why I'm still responding to this thread 24 hours later, but just thought I'd add this tweet from Le Cun: "Neuroscience greatly influenced me (there is a direct line from Hubel & Wiesel to ConvNets) and Geoff Hinton. And the whole idea of neural nets and learning by adjusting synaptic weights clearly comes from neuroscience."

https://x.com/ylecun/status/1583872918634655744?s=20