Neural network

The Jolly Contrarian’s Dictionary The snippy guide to financial services lingo.™ →Go uptown Index — Click ᐅ to expand: Dictionary Tell me more Sign up for our newsletter — or just get in touch: for ½ a weekly 🍺 you get to consult JC. Ask about it here.

Neural network (n.)
An artificial neural network is a computing system vaguely inspired by the biological neural networks that constitute animal brains. “Vaguely inspired” in the way that Conan the Barbarian was vaguely inspired by Nietzsche.

It is based on collections of nodes called “artificial neurons”, which loosely model the neurons in a biological brain. It is very good at crunching terabytes of data to recognise dogs on the internet, and predict that, when you want to reply to a colleague’s LinkedIn humblebraggadocio, “So inspired by you!” is what you really want to say.