It's nice to throw around claims like that, or like "microtubules connect the brain the quantum realm" (Penrose). Fortunately that's not how science works.

Science starts with a hypothesis. If DNA has everything encoded, then it stands to reason that it influences the initial state of the brain.

> If DNA has everything encoded

It is not. There are many biological examples of random processes generating patterns and weights, such tiger stripes, fingerprints, etc. DNA only encodes the reaction, but the pattern itself is seeded by initial position of random molecules, not the DNA.

> that it influences the initial state of the brain.

You've gone from "DNA is probably the seed for the random initialization", as in the deterministic seed for a PRNG, to "influences". Those are 2 different claims.

Most scientists will agree that DNA encodes the large-scale connectivity in the brain, ie from region to region, thickness of corpus callosum etc.

Most scientists will disagree that it is "probable" that DNA encodes/seeds the weights of each and every synapse.

I think you are mostly debating against a strawman of your own construction here. The person you're responding to never claimed that "seeding the random initialization" means literally the same thing as seeding a pseudo-random number generator, and the second message was likely intended as a clarification after being misunderstood. So it's not "2 different claims" contradicting; it's a single underlying claim being expressed through a lossy medium in an increasing level of detail.

My own reading of the poster's intent aligns with this: "DNA encodes the large-scale connectivity in the brain, ie from region to region, thickness of corpus callosum etc."

The grandparent comment is: "humans aren’t born with randomly initialised neural weights", with commenters throwing around harebrained hypotheses about those weights.

Most biologists will fully disagree with the whole premise, and support the reverse claim that we are born with random weights, we learn to walk/speak English/etc after we're born. Not from weights in our DNA.

Yes, but there is clearly DNA scaffolding needed. The closest related animals to us cannot speak English, no mater how much training they are given.

Except Penrose is like Chomsky. They have past accomplishments, but nothing recent and everybody keeps bringing them up because they constantly comment on stuff so far outside of their area of expertise it's not funny anymore, it's just sad.

At least Penrose had the good manners to make a relevant contributions (meaning Chomsky effectively managed to steer his field in entirely the wrong direction and nobody uses his contributions today in study)

Most scientists think Penrose's theory of microtubules is wrong, however he is still far better than many consciousness theorists in giving an actual testable criterion.

I understand what happened. You took my claim literally. Like DNA translates by a simple function to random initialization. I was saying that all else being equal, DNA will influence the way the brain initializes. Of course, many factors will influence it.

This is actually a genius idea. Imagine being able to compress a 1T parameter model to 10M params by creating a lossy model-scaffolding, like DNA

Something that more or less guarantees you’ll get about the same capabilities as the original model, but with a different final expression of certain characteristics

I wonder if this could be a good distribution model too, selling “dried” models (almost like raisins - or the beings from the 3 body problem), and then you can buy them to fully train (raise?) with your own data

Aside from violating everything we know about neural networks (technically this would mean there is a way to reduce the rank of even something like ChatGPT to 1. There isn't. No way) it would also be VERY unlike what DNA does. DNA has lots of ways to express things that aren't easily disturbed by mistakes. Those mistakes are then an actual positive, in the very long term, because they help natural selection along.

A random seed that works would be the exact opposite of that.

> Aside from violating everything we know about neural networks

Not sure exactly what this means

But there’s prior art on the concept of compressing models through lossy representations

In particular, procedural generation of models, check out HyperNEAT (2009), HyperNetworks (2017) and Developmental Symbolic Encoding (2011)

> Not sure exactly what this means

It means that neural networks are a mistake, that they don't really have to be as complex as they are and animal minds could just calculate directly from the seed as opposed to building and powering this very expensive organ. The brain uses more power than any muscle in essentially all mammals and even more in humans. Only olympic-level efforts come anywhere close to power usage like the brain on a single muscle. So your body is really giving up something serious to let you think, to keep track of 100 Trillion weights and constantly evaluate against them.

This would be something very strange for DNA/evolution to do. Especially where it comes to energy use, if it can be done with 10W of power, you can bet your firstborn DNA will NEVER under any circumstances get caught using 10.01W.

I'm somewhat of a genius (self-described.)

I like your idea of "base" models for sale.