News for hackers. Stuff that matters.

wernam

Re:Quadrillion-parameter transformers and how to train them on Sunday November 08, 2026 @11:04AM (#50414402)
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.

Re:Quadrillion-parameter transformers and how to train them on Sunday November 08, 2026 @09:55AM (#50413853)
> 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.

Re:Quadrillion-parameter transformers and how to train them on Sunday November 08, 2026 @09:42AM (#50413766)
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.
Re:Anthropic IPO Buyers See Valuation as Low as $1.1T on Friday November 06, 2026 @03:56PM (#50398416)
AMD Ryzen AI/Strix Halo is for running locally on your hardware. Openrouter is for evaluating the models you'll be running locally, before buying the hardware.
Re:Anthropic IPO Buyers See Valuation as Low as $1.1T on Friday November 06, 2026 @02:57PM (#50397532)
12GB GPU is useless. The good experience is with 128-256GB unified memory architectures like strix halo etc. You don't need to buy any hardware, you can experience the latest open weight MOE (flash) models from DeepSeek, qwen, or GLM on openrouter using a local agent like kilo.