The paper explores an approach to constructing energy landscapes of a formal neuron and multilayer artificial neural networks (ANNs). Their analysis makes it possible to determine the conceptual limitations of both classification ANNs (e.g., MLP or CNN) and generative ANN models. The study of informational and thermodynamic entropy in formal neuron and ANN models leads to the conclusion about the energetic nature of informational entropy. The application of the Gibbs free energy concept allows representing the output information of ANNs as the structured part of enthalpy. Modeling ANNs as energy systems makes it possible to interpret the structure of their internal energy as an internal model of the external world, which self-organizes based on the interaction of the system's internal energy components. The control of the self-organization and evolution process of this model is carried out through an energy function (analogous to the Lyapunov function) based on reduction operators. This makes it possible to introduce a new approach to constructing self-organizing and evolutionary ANNs with direct learning, which does not require additional external algorithms. The presented research makes it possible to formulate a formal definition of information in terms of the interaction processes between the internal and external energy of the system.