As I said, the parent comment didn't say the network was self modifying. The exact quote was "this is about teaching computers to re-write their own code" which is roughly correct. If you see the weights of neural network as a sort of code, then the computer is rewriting it's own code.
And if you see the universe as "a sort of code", the network is rewiring the universe!
How's that for a bombastic editorial title?
(To be clear, I'm 100% agreeing with gcr here. Parameter optimization is a tremendously powerful technique, and quite possibly the "true currency" of our universe, but there's a few abstraction layers missing between that and a claim of "self-modifying AI")
The universe isn't code, and only gcr used the term "self modifying". There is absolutely nothing bombastic implied by the statement that a program can rewrite code.
