I really resonate with the core of your pitch here. I also agree that the field is stuck, biology works, and the gap between the two is underexplored. And the fact that you've actually built something that demonstrates sparse reward learning with a hippocampal memory system puts this well above a pure ideas pitch. The Snake results are genuinely interesting.
A few questions I was left with after reading your submission:
You name regional specialization as what differentiates your approach from the cargo cult biomimetic efforts you critique. But regional specialization is itself a mechanical specific of the brain, so what's the principled story for why this is the key insight those other efforts missed, rather than just being a different flavor of bio-mimicry?
Your stated vision of success is frontier labs redirecting resources toward alternative architectures. But the method is "I'll build a small proof of concept that shocks them into action." How would you evaluate whether what you're doing is actually moving you toward that institutional goal? And is building it yourself necessarily the most efficient path there, versus say, writing the theoretical case, getting embedded at a lab, or amplifying existing aligned work like Sakana's CTM? Developing your own novel biomimetic architecture that's impressive enough to get frontier labs to start allocating their resources away from their current research efforts and into more novel biomimetic approaches is something that'll take a lot of time and resources to invest in, but I don't see how you're keeping a metric of evaluating if you're moving closer to success or not.
Lastly, what's the failure model? The pitch reads as a straight line from Snake to Atari 100k to drone racing, but bio-inspired work is full of unexpected walls. If Atari 100k doesn't go well, how do you diagnose whether the problem is in your implementation or your thesis or your publicity strategy? What does a pivot look like? If Atari 100k does go well and it doesn't receive the attention you expected, how do you move from there?
Overall, the pitch is pretty solid. The conviction is clear, the direction is worth exploring, and you're already developing something novel and interesting. Just want to see a sharper account of why your specific approach is the right one, and a plan for what happens if the road gets bumpy.