The trippy pictures and the vaguely C-looking code are just cool stunts, not serious experiments. People may be tempted to fell into the hype, sometimes a reality check is helpful.

This said, neural networks really do well in difficult tasks such as visual object recognition and machine translation, indeed for reasons that are not fully understood.

Sounds like a good reason to study the field in order to understand why they can do what they do, and why they can't do what they can't do, doesn't it?