I agree. I just enjoyed diving into HTM at the time and learning cool stuff about the brain. It was a nice break from the math/engineering heavy DL concepts.

In an alternate universe, Numenta's Hierarchical Temporal Memory model has won the race against Deep Learning. Sometimes I wish I lived in that universe.

It's an ML paradigm deeply rooted in neuroscience. Things like HTM School on Youtube are just awesome. I believe that if the ML community had jumped on the HTM wagon at the time (and Transfomers hadn't shown up) and had invested the same amount of effort into it as it has into DL, we would be at a similar point in development but with a better ML framework.

This comes to mind https://arxiv.org/abs/2102.00176