I don't have access to a WIRED subscription currently, so I only see the first few lines, but then again a flavor for some problems with that article seems to start right at the title and opening paragraphs.
"The Genius Neuroscientist Who Might Hold the Key to True AI"
Karl Friston's free energy principle might be the most all-encompassing idea since the theory of natural selection. But to understand it, you need to peer inside the mind of Friston himself.
The gist of the problem is Karl Friston didn't come up with the idea in question, yet somehow he's often promoted publicly much as if he did.
Variational free energy methods generally are pretty amazing. Thanks to mathematicians, physicist, chemists and so on over the course of the last three centuries or so for giving us that.
Free energy methods in perception and learning are also very interesting, and that goes back at least to Geoff Hinton, Richard Zemel and Radford Neal in the mid 90s (arguably there is relevant prior work in psychology and energy based ANN before that too).
It's hard to believe Friston's application of the theory to brain function (as opposed to earlier in brain imaging) would be independent of having arrived at University College London, where people at Gatsby Unit (Hinton, Peter Dayan, etc) had been working with the methods in innovative and and effective ways for machine learning/artificial intelligence/theoretical neuroscience since the 90s.
Yet if you entered the subfield through Friston's citations, which many people now do, due in no small part to glowing personality portraits like the one presented by WIRED, you might easily come away with the impression that the whole field suddenly manifested out of whole cloth between the ears of this Genius Neuroscientist, some time in the 00s.
Friston does have one real distinguishing contribution to his name though, in being the first person to reach wide attention making vocal and bold claims that the "free energy principle" amounts to a largely comprehensive explanation for how the human brain works.
Good for him if that turns out to be the case I guess, but personally I'm not aware of any demonstrations that it actually is such a powerful explanation for any mechanisms of brain function.
I have no personal knowledge of Karl Friston, but I've heard he's often well liked in personal contacts.
I don't really know enough about the medical imaging methods era of his work to comment on it.
And I took it at face value, what am I missing?