Perhaps but my understanding is that, at least for vision, the brain learns by trying to predict nearby neurons as well as the future, thus learning an internal model of the world.

Algorithms that do something like this are called Deep Learning and have recently proven extremely effective at machine vision and other tasks. They don't all work by prediction per se but they do learn to compress the input down to a smaller representation of features that can be used to recreate it and are very related to prediction.