"In another experiment, they asked Astra to make Qwen3.5-0.8B better at math by editing its weights"

nullc a day ago | parent | next [-]

Which it did by doing an inefficient version of the aforementioned 1940s algorithm.

Essentially modern LLMs are able to do normal AI engineering tasks, like running optimization algorithms over weights. The media has been inaccurately describing this as if the AI had some special insight into the weights, when it reality it just performed the tasks a human engineer might do.

	▲	yorwba a day ago \| parent [-]
		Right, humans don't need some special insight into weights either, since it's just a bunch of numbers that you can analyze like any other table with numbers. However, if you dump them on someone like in this prompt: https://github.com/RikiyaT/lm_understand-logs/blob/main/exp1... they might complain about the formatting or ask whether they can use Excel instead of doing calculations by hand. (The experiment with Qwen3.5-0.8B didn't use the "dump weights into the context as numbers" approach.)

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kragen a day ago | parent | prev [-]

That's not what's being described here; that's described in another paper that this is a followup to.