fly-distill

A controlled study that freezes the larval Drosophila connectome of Winding et al. 2023 (2,952 neurons, 38,401 edges at the three-synapse threshold) as the recurrent substrate of a byte-level language model, against degree-preserving shuffles, Erdos-Renyi graphs, weight erasure and a hub-capping arm. Decision rules were written before the data, four seeds ran to 150M training bytes, and the whole thing fits in roughly 277 GPU-hours on one 4 GB laptop GPU. The paper title carries the finding: at this scale, hub concentration masks the benefit of the biological wiring.

Official site ↗

#larval#language-model#controlled-study#degree-preserving-shuffle#erdos-renyi-control#hub-cap#pre-registered