The Case for B-Tree Index Structures

Recently a very interesting paper made a Case for Learned Index Structures. It argued that we could, and perhaps should, replace traditional index structures with machine learning, using the following reasoning: If we consider the leaf pages of an index as a sorted array, the inner pages of the index point towards a (bucketized) position within that array. Which means that it essentially describes the cummulative distribution function (CDF), mapping from keys to array positions. And the argument of that paper was that using machine learning we can do that mapping much better because a) the learned model (in this case neuronal network) is much smaller than a traditional b-tree, and b) the learned model can predict the CDF value much more accurately than a simple b-tree, which improves performance. Now I am all in favor of trying out new ideas, and adapting to the data distribution is clearly a good idea, but do we really need a neural network for that?