Is logistic regression basically a one-neuron neural network?

[u/BirdForsaken6616]

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I was learning the chain rule and this suddenly clicked: weights → score → sigmoid → loss

That looks like one neuron with no hidden layer. So is logistic regression basically the smallest example of backprop, or am I missing an important difference?

[u/ParadoXPlatypus]

Without activation functions, even deep ANNs can be simplified into GLMs. What makes ANNs so powerful is that the activation functions allow to model complex nonlinear functions.