I don't think this is an emergent capability. I think Astra was trained on neural weights data as an attempt by OpenAI to get to recursive self improvement.

Something similar happen in early GPT models which had a lot of chess game in standard notation in their training data which made them very good at chess as long as your prompt had the right format.

We'll see if this attempt at RSI worked.

> I think Astra was trained on neural weights data as an attempt by OpenAI to get to recursive self improvement.

This might be the case, a few weeks ago, I wanted to compare a small neural network trained with AdamW vs a handcrafted set of weights on a random task. Astra was able to handcraft a set of weights that perfectly fit the small neural network to the task. AdamW was unable to tune the weights to get the same result.

I believe we've known humans can handcraft weights much more efficiently than standard gradient descent methods, we just don't have enough memory or time to scale ourselves, so it makes sense to train a neural network to do it on our behalf. I am excited to see how far we can push this method.

Mentioned chat: https://chatgpt.com/share/6ae8f024-34ec-83e8-9572-1300f52c80...