Does AI really need biological plausibility?

Eliasmith has criticized Markham's recent Blue Brain paper (Cell, 163, pg 1, 2015) saying "But you can get all those results with a way less complicated model."  But if your interest is in modeling general intelligence then I fear that I might say the same thing about Eliasmith's own model of the brain, Spaun. (Science, 338, 30 Nov. 2012) The very limited short term memory that humans have is something I certainly don't want to duplicate in any AI.