I don't think you are correct from an information computation point of view. When looking at the computation done by neurons in the brain it is sufficient to abstract away the lower-level substrate in which it occurs.

You and other posters are all correct regarding the huge volume of information on which human minds are trained. it's hardly unsupervised learning either :)

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EDIT: In response to your comment, I've given it further reflection. DNA as source code may be misleading as an "upper bounds". After all, suppose we knew for a fact (assume there were a mathematical proof or anyway just assume axiomatically) that a one hundred megabyte source code file completely described (contained every physical law etc) a deterministic Universe, and that if you ran it on enough computation to fully describe a hundred billion galaxies with a hundred billion stars each, one of those stars would have a planet and that planet would contain humans and the humans at some point in the simulation would deduce the same one hundred megabyte source code file for their Universe. (This is a bit of a stretch as it's not possible to deduce the laws of the universe rigorously.)

Anyway under that assumption in a way you could argue that the "upper bounds" on the amount of entropy that it takes to produce human intelligence is "just" a hundred megabytes, since that source code can deterministically model the entire Universe. But practically that is useless, and the humans in that simulation would have to do something quite different from modeling their universe, if they wanted to come up with AI to help them with whatever computational tasks they wanted to do.

In the same way, perhaps DNA is a red herring, as there are a vast number of cells in the human body (as in, tens of trillions) doing an incredible amount of work. So starting out with DNA is the "wrong level" of emulation, just as starting out with a 100 MB source code file for the universe would be the "wrong level" of emulation, even if we posit axiomatically that it fully describes our entire Universe from the big bang through intelligent humans.

So I will concede that it is misleading.

All that said, I think that emulating or considering the computation on the level of neurons is sufficient - so it is sufficient to look at how many neurons are in the human brain and the kind of connections they have.

As for the efficacy of this approach - that's the very thing that is being shown in the story we're replying to and many places elsewhere. It works. We're getting extremely strong results, that in some cases beat humans.

I believe that emulating or comparing to humans at the neural level should probably be sufficient for extremely strong results. We do not need to emulate every atom or anything like that. I consider it out of the question that we would discover that human minds form a biochemical pathway into another ethereal soul-plane and connect with our souls in a way that you can't emulate by emulating neurons and the like, and that the souls are where intellect happens and brains are just like "radio antennas" for them. Instead, I think that the approaches we're seeing will achieve in many ways similar results to what humans brains produce computationally - a much higher level of abstraction is sufficient for the results that are sought.