The initial weights in a neural network are initialized randomly because the gradient based methods commonly used to train neural networks do not work well when all of the weights are initialized to the same value. While not all of the methods to train neural networks are gradient based, most of them are, and it has been shown in several cases that initializing the neural network to the same value makes the network take much longer to converge on an optimum solution. Also, if you want to retrain your neural network because it got stuck in a local minima, it will get stuck in the same local minima. For the above reasons, we do not set the initial weights to a constant value.

References: https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/45087/why-doesnt-backpropagation-work-when-you-initialize-the-weights-the-same-value

The initial weights in a neural network are initialized randomly because the gradient based methods commonly used to train neural networks do not work well when all of the weights are initialized to the same value. While not all of the methods to train neural networks are gradient based, most of them are, and it has been shown in several cases that initializing the neural network to the same value makes the network take much longer to converge on an optimum solution. Also, if you want to retrain your neural network because it got stuck in a local minima, it will get stuck in the same local minima. For the above reasons, we do not set the initial weights to a constant value.

References: Why doesn't backpropagation work when you initialize the weights the same value?

The initial weights in a neural network are initialized randomly because the gradient based methods commonly used to train neural networks do not work well when all of the weights are initialized to the same value. While not all of the methods to train neural networks are gradient based, most of them are, and it has been shown in several cases that initializing the neural network to the same value makes the network take much longer to converge on an optimum solution. Also, if you want to retrain your neural network because it got stuck in a local minima, it will get stuck in the same local minima. For the above reasons, we do not set the initial weights to a constant value.

The initial weights in a neural network are initialized randomly because the gradient based methods commonly used to train neural networks do not work well when all of the weights are initialized to the same value. While not all of the methods to train neural networks are gradient based, most of them are, and it has been shown in several cases that initializing the neural network to the same value makes the network take much longer to converge on an optimum solution. Also, if you want to retrain your neural network because it got stuck in a local minima, it will get stuck in the same local minima. For the above reasons, we do not set the initial weights to a constant value.

References: https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/45087/why-doesnt-backpropagation-work-when-you-initialize-the-weights-the-same-value