Biography|Dario Amodei — The Neural-Circuit Thesis at Jadwin Hall

In 2011 Princeton University accepted a physics dissertation from Dario Amodei.

The title was Network-Scale Electrophysiology: Measuring and Understanding the Collective Behavior of Neural Circuits.

Princeton's DataSpace catalogue lists the issuing department as Physics and the year as 2011.

The work sat under two advisers: Michael J. Berry in the Princeton Neuroscience Institute and William Bialek in physics.

The department's headquarters is Jadwin Hall, dedicated in 1970 as a memorial to Stanley Palmer Jadwin, a six-storey block of laboratories and offices west of the old Palmer Stadium site.

Amodei used the retina as a model system.

Part of the thesis described a denser microelectrode array and a spike-sorting method that could record almost all of the 200-plus ganglion cells in a 0.5 by 0.5 millimetre patch.

Later chapters fitted collective-activity models, including an Ising model, to those recorded patterns.

The Fannie and John Hertz Foundation had named him a fellow in 2007 while the doctorate was underway.

The same foundation gave the finished thesis its Hertz Thesis Prize in 2011.

He was not yet an artificial-intelligence executive.

He was measuring how a small sheet of living neurons fires as a group.

The later language models asked the same question at industrial scale: what a large network of simple units does that no single unit can do.

After the defence he went to Stanford University School of Medicine as a postdoctoral scholar, then into industrial laboratories.

The pin is Jadwin Hall, the physics building on a public campus, not a private room.

The 2023 portrait is later than the thesis year.

Photo: Mike Peel, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons (Jadwin Hall). Portrait: Simon Walker / No 10 Downing Street, CC BY 2.0.