[twomoretime]

>well, their programmers usually have to engage in a laborious process of manually adjusting the initial coefficients, or weights, that will be applied to each type of data point the network processes.

Not true for modern neural networks. We typically use random values with certain statistics and/or specialized schemes which depend on specific later details - but in any case it's a single function call and the defaults typically work well enough that it's an advanced topic.

The OP is probably referring to neural nets of old, before this recent explosion, where you had handfuls of perceptrons operating on very simple problems which would be trivial for modern ML.