How quickly did you read this? He says very nearly what you are saying:
"Well, I want to be a little careful here. I think it’s important to distinguish two areas where the word neural is currently being used.
One of them is in deep learning. And there, each “neuron” is really a cartoon. It’s a linear-weighted sum that’s passed through a nonlinearity. Anyone in electrical engineering would recognize those kinds of nonlinear systems. Calling that a neuron is clearly, at best, a shorthand. It’s really a cartoon. There is a procedure called logistic regression in statistics that dates from the 1950s, which had nothing to do with neurons but which is exactly the same little piece of architecture."
"Well, I want to be a little careful here. I think it’s important to distinguish two areas where the word neural is currently being used.
One of them is in deep learning. And there, each “neuron” is really a cartoon. It’s a linear-weighted sum that’s passed through a nonlinearity. Anyone in electrical engineering would recognize those kinds of nonlinear systems. Calling that a neuron is clearly, at best, a shorthand. It’s really a cartoon. There is a procedure called logistic regression in statistics that dates from the 1950s, which had nothing to do with neurons but which is exactly the same little piece of architecture."