I'm not saying that neural nets are brute force. I'm saying that there haven't been any algorithmic improvements in neural nets to make them more computationally feasible than they were when they were first invented. Instead, we have specialized hardware which can just do the necessary computation quickly enough to make neural nets feasible.

It's not like neural nets are a new technology. They've been known since the '80s, at least. It's just that they were considered a dead end, because we didn't have the computational resources to run deep neural nets, nor did we have sufficient training data to make neural-net approaches feasible. Once those preconditions were met, neural nets took off in short order.