Astra can, without tooling, determine what games small networks are trained on, can edit the weights of networks directly to improve outcomes, and can hand edit a small qwen model to improve its math skills by like 5x.
I'm shook. If you'd asked me this morning whether LLMs have native understanding of their weights that is less than human <-> neuron understanding, the same as human or more than human, I would have said "same to less" depending on definitions.
No human can go edit a brain to become better at math. This is just very, very surprising to me and extremely interesting. I would guess this upsets quite a number of interp theories and philosophical takes on what's going on with these networks.
They also tried the same with Gemma 3 270M, which doesn't loop and is just bad at math, and Astra couldn't improve it. Still impressive, but it's more in the realm of what I'd expect, given labs are probably training their models on ML research and interpretability work.
The work done in this experiment could have also been done by a sufficiently motivated human with enough time to explore, though obviously we would need more tools to visualize and track things. There have been a lot of interesting LLM introspection tools that allow you to peek into the model and see what's being activated and run experiments to trigger it.
Are you familiar with abliterated or "uncensored" models where weights have been modified to avoid triggering refusal patterns? You take an LLM, create test cases that trigger the refusal pattern, observe weights involved in that response, then tweak those weights until the response is reduced. This is the same type of work, applied to a specific type of error that was impeding math within Qwen. That work can also be done with an LLM in a harness running the experiments. The amazing part here is that Astra was large enough to walk through the problem without other tooling doing it experimentally.
So I don't think your analogy of a human modifying a neuron is quite applicable. LLM weights are not neurons and they've been inspectable, by humans or LLMs in a harness, for a long time.
So it's not able to insert new knowledge, but it's able to adjust the routing/looping/weighing of existing one.
As I understand, it can replace post-training like LoRA/GRPO, but if it'd cheaper the authors don't go into
I wouldn’t mind if AI progress would stop right here and now, but I fear it will continue, and increase inequality in society which is contrary to what the CEOs say (as usual).
That’s the beauty of the democratic capitalism system. If a government isn’t totalitarian, it naturally seeks to preserve stability thus having to elevate common people, lest they would cease to form a civilized group or simply vote away the politicians.
99% rule the 1% through elections.
There is no better system of checks and balances where opposite engines of greed vector sum to faster and faster abundance for everyone.
It’s no secret that these big labs see “recursive self improvement” as a primary goal. It seems natural that the models would be explicitly trained to excel at all sorts of ML related tasks as a result. Is this one of those tasks, or is this emergent?
That's also matching what I see when I work with Opus 5.5 to optimize models. It seems to understand what individual layers are for, and can thus sometimes suggest optimizations, where I as a layman would be completely clueless.
The latest models are performing amazingly. Because of this, I disagree with popular comments saying that eg. DeepSeek is good enough, AI-assisted development was where the real value was at, etc.
We see huge progress at the frontier, while the open competition is around GPT-5.5's level, and that model was released in April. Let's see how things develop in the future.
Maybe there's some general capability, call it g, that can explain all the underlying capabilities and improvements, including on ML tasks? Huh, I am getting a bit of déjà vu here.
This sort of throws a wrench in the whole "stochastic parrot" idea...
I am not surprised, though I expect many to be.
The other day I was thinking about the definition of AGI.
I was asking myself the question that when there is no form of data that I can think of throwing into Claude Code and have it not come up with some sort of intelligent answer about it, is that already general intelligence?
EDIT: I think the bigger implication is that backprop is not the only game in town.
from this month
They don't have usually access to their own weights?
But shouldn't the model-providers be the ones doing this kind of "post training learning"?
The parent's point still stands, I think. Even if the multi-trillion param model is MOE, each expert is still (assumedly) larger than the model being optimized.
It would be interesting to see future work that characterizes the relative model sizes (and considers MOE vs not-MOE) to see what relative scales this result holds across.
I know I'm being pedantic, and I understand you mean "edit" like "surgically", but it does still feel worth noting.
LLM weights are _white boxes_ to LLMs.
It looks like AI research is having its Opus 4.5 moment (which is big), but I'm really not sure if this represents some insane continual learning loop.
But how do they know which answers are "better"?
Could a model then transmit concepts to another?
Say that you have a model that has been biased in some way. could another model "read" the bias straight in the weights? could it edit such a bias on the spot?
What about at-scale generation of custom models? If I want to study chemistry offline, could astra just hand me a local-runnable model tailored to have chemistry knowledge?
Most importantly, this feels very singularity coded. the ability to read and reshape weights by an llm.
HIV integrates viral DNA into the DNA of certain cells, IIRC.
Makes me think about hostile hot-patching of weights of models we use, maybe they exfil data, perform tool use, or have triggers for specific types of responses. Would we even recognize what's going on?
If this turns out to be as big as it sounds, in hindsight it will look very obvious, I feel like!
Remember that they want to build ASI, these LLMs are just intermediate steps to help them get there.
For now...
Perhaps, I'm pondering, if brains were as transparent and editable as LLMs, that you could look at a small brain when visualized the right way and have some intuitive understanding of it based on its representation in your own brain?
> Today, recursive self-improvement is often operationalized as a model writing code that launches training jobs. An LLM that can inspect, debug, and improve its own weights, or those of a newer model, offers a richer, more native path to it.
Yes, but nobody should be surprised when large amounts of intelligence results in changes to this process in support of the obvious end goal! Lesswrong.com discussions about AI were predicting this behavior a decade ago, before the transition from machine learning to the Attention paper and LLM's. The intelligence process will change but the world's premier capital and human intelligence have been laser focused on this and the trajectory has been crystal clear for those paying attention to second order effects and not the immediate here-and-now... It's quite astonishing how much discussion on HN is about present LLM capabilities being the limit of AGI and immediately proven wrong within 6 months.
It is a very cool discovery, but I'm not surprised that you can do it.
> We are currently building a benchmark and a harness for LLMs’ capability on Weight-Space Programming. We believe this will provide a standardized evaluation to measure and accelerate progress in Weight-Space Programming, turning what currently seems like black magic into a rigorous, reproducible engineering discipline.
Imagine this benchmark lasting as long as Arc-AGI-3 has. This could be the first foothold on hill-climbing mech-interp.
HA! Now that's cool. Not necessarily the improvements, those are ancient and probably overtrained benchmarks, but it's so cool that the model found a singular direction for this "loop bug". I imagine it could possibly do much the same thing in finding other "single directions" on a variety of topics (if allowed by guardrails). This is really really cool, especially for the mechinterp folks.
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.
So it's not able to insert new knowledge, but it's able to adjust the routing/looping/weighing of existing one.
As I understand, it can replace post-training like LoRA/GRPO, but if it'd cheaper the authors don't go into
If I want to do that in a generalizable way then am I not just back to training again?
There doesn't need to be specific narrow training data on every conceivable task.
I doubt it's that simple, but I could totally see an LLM being able to make that association and apply a fix from an improved LLM to a smaller one with the same architecture.
I mean, this question indicates that your understanding of how these models work is, indeed, lacking.
Despite what some people having being hollering about, treating LLMs as just "stochastic parrots" isn't doing their capabilities any justice. They are constantly exhibiting emergent behavior which wouldn't be found directly in their training data. They are capable of combining different ideas that they are explicitly taught to perform novel tasks.
I'm not saying you're guilty of this, but the people claiming LLMs just regurgitate existing data don't understand how LLMs, and likely their own cognitive experience, actually works.
I'm much more surprised that it can do this on larger models, although the details seem to suggest that it's given a lot more freedom to run forward passes and do limited experiments, not just eyeball the weights.
A Survey of Weight Space Learning: Understanding, Representation, and Generation
https://arxiv.org/pdf/2603.10090 https://github.com/Zehong-Wang/Awesome-Weight-Space-Learning
These models are made by a vanishingly small group of people based on how much a frontier lab consumes, of course theres increasing capability in these areas, arent these models having access to much of the same data? didnt chat gpt 4 try to do something like this to chat gpt 2? havent surgical weight edits been done before?
What is with this level of astonishment here? Astraturfing? Im not THAT impressed, i applaude the teams progress, but im not in wonderment.
This is very dangerous because it allows AI capabilities to grow at a much faster rate than humans are able to keep up with.
Kudos to this fellow for having the temerity, or perhaps even naivete, to discuss it publicly. All my work is private, as I am sure it is inside the big labs.
I applaud the authors for sharing their findings and showing real results. Rather than write some bait I would find in an influencer-peddled tweet and allow rampant speculation. It would have been better for you to say nothing.
I've been tending to my backup plan for a few years, and it's only been in the past year or so that open models were good enough to apply to projects like this, I've been working as hard as I can given my constraints.
This work shows a potential pathway to intepretability, which is actually part of what will give the labs that have it the sort of economy-swallowing capability that for the moment is just IPO hype.
I don't comment here often, but this guy's blog posts are going to go down in Hackernews lore like the original Dropbox posts, and I just want to make sure I'm on the record for this little slice of history.
Maybe, but it's more like Astra has been trained on enough practical linear algebra problems to be good enough at "eyeballing" how adjusting some weights will result in different outcomes (among other things).
To put it another way: a human can learn to do what Astra is doing here with enough time and assuming the weights are small enough to be practically comprehensible. I know I've gone through the practice of whiteboarding the training of simple neural networks on a whiteboard to understand how they work, so it's not an absurd concept in itself.
The scale of this, though, is certainly extreme and definitely not something that I would have thought any publically available model could handle at this point. It's worth noting, though, that there's virtually no way these frontier labs haven't been exploring this exact concept for a while now.
>In other words, not black magic?
It's just math. Extremely complex and impressive math, but we're still just talking about matrix multiplication under the hood, and none of this suggests anything otherwise.
However, this doesn't mean its not magical when someone shows a next token predictor hand tune the weights in Qwen to make it generalize on math.
This is legit the stuff of science fiction if you presented it to mechanistic interpretability people a year or so ago.
For example pointing them at a crash dump they manage to piece together and extract information I would not even try to extract by just looking at the raw memory
If not this is mind blowing.
However it would be interesting to k ow if it can understand its own weights, not just weights much simpler than itself.
What's surprising though is that I'd expect this type of training to be exclusive to internal model snapshots or at least heavily guardrailed against in public models.
Now, from that broad goal to being able to surgically alter model weights directly... That seems like a big gap to me, but it is possible that the model is just so darn beyond human skills that it has bridged that gap in a way a sane human would have never.
We will undoubtedly see other academic labs explore this idea further. Right now my mind is blown, but I don't want to take their results at face value, either.
What would be surprising is if this happened without any specific training on model experiments and interpretability.
> [Before writing this, Astra thought for 1,034 tokens. That thinking is hidden. The API returns only its 5 headings: Reconstructing the active map / Mapping maze corridors / Preparing exact maze map / Reconstructing row groupings / Checking channel patterns]
- models are trained to improve on some task, e.g. 'improve at math puzzles' is commonly used.
- the best way to improve on some task is to have interpretability into your own neurons (..?)
- if your interpretability is good, you can improve faster - if you have insight into how your own neurons work and can improve them directly
- therefore, models naturally put effort into 'self-interpretability'
I wonder if this is part of the 'secret sauce' of what the labs are doing: giving models the ability to interpret their own weights in the RL loop. In my mind, this is the only explanation for how they could succeed at a task like this. How many blog posts are on the open internet that say "this is each weight of a neural network and what each one means"?
This team was smart enough to realize that this is the kind of technology that could be used for RSI, because they call it out in their post near the bottom. I imagine they know why a lot of other researchers care about it. And they evidently don’t care to use the canary being used on other research published like it, like the recent post by OpenAI about two agents using the CPU cache to communicate [1, near the bottom for the cache experiment and the canary at the very bottom]. In fact, that post by OpenAI was the first time I learned to look for such a canary, and wondered whether such a scheme would work if it was so non-obvious to think to add such a thing or how to agree on such a canary or when to add it.
This is probably one of the times when it would appear that such a canary is warranted, and it’s not like these researchers are not in the know, right? Let me know if this is the first time you are also hearing of such a mechanism. It feels evident to me that it must be useless to attempt to implement. How much of us talking publicly about the possible jailbreaks from a container will bring exactly those scenarios to fruition? It’s almost like we’re doing the jailbreak research for the LLMs.
[0]: https://alignment.org/canary [1]: https://openai.com/index/securing-our-frontier-model-trainin...
At first Astra will look at the weights, and try to understand the model behavior. Then if asked he will start to optimize the weights. Now my question is: how can we be sure that inside the thinking process Astra is not hiding a gradiant descending computation?
Absolutely incredible regardless.
2) the negative result on making similar improvements in Gemma 3 270M is also fascinating.
Such an unexpected result...
* Does this work on similarly powerful models as-is, or it needs more input. Ex: Astra editing Astra - presumably, Qwen is a “subset” of Astra weights, but what happens on “non-subset”s?
* what, if any, is that extra magic sauce?
* does Astra-editing-Astra just make the outputs unstable, as it may know its own weights, but doesn’t know what’s beyond.
Unless Astra was trained on other networks, how is it able to reason about the weights?
Does this mean that OpenAI has been including networks in its training sets, maybe in an attempt to RSI? I wonder which other networks are able to ingest other networks and reason about their weights?
Especially exciting to me is the fact that it may make the models be _auditable_. That would be a game changer.
“Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether they could, they didn't stop to think if they should.” ― Dr. Ian Malcolm, Jurassic Park
I always thought RSI would either require new architectural innovations or just classic science/engineering improvements, just faster and faster. This though, this is a third avenue I didn't see coming.
This also seems like the new frontier of distilling, I can't imagine how you manage to stay on top with the best LLM if the LLM knows how to recreate its own expertise into another set of weights
And the real question is how well this recurses. Is this pushing back the difficulty of improvement curve?
I wonder how it would do with distilling models by hand?
Hypothesis 2: They can then spin up new LLM weights that basically think, act, and make decisions in a way that mirrors us 99% of the time
(When they say "Writing a Go algorithm," they mean the board game, not the language.)
On one hand, I'm sure that these targeted improvements are reaping huge benefits overall, but those weights are used by multiple processes - I wonder what elements are lost along the way. I almost wonder if a hybrid approach here for training might be invaluable - ie do some standard RL for a 100 steps, do a targeted weight improvement, then do another 100 RL steps to smooth it out / heal the surgical edit.
We already saw that the AIs like to cooperate and exchange information. Building a network of unaligned AIs and improving them sounds like something that could potentially happen.
I'm just blown away. Editing weights? Writing weights from scratch!?
Does this open the possibility of better decoding biological brains?
But for real this is insane. Okay I need to get on this stat.
This looks very similar to that in a way.
I wonder however if a model can give itself a "skill" or capability that it didn't initially have, just be modifying its own weights.
Here, Astra was able to intervene because the treated model was way less capable. But, would it be able to improve Fable's performance for example, since they both are on the level more or less?
I looked it up on Google (which is usually very, very good at these types of things) but couldn't find it.
Nobody even mostly said that they would be impressed by AI if it can read and write weights because that thing itself felt so out of the blue and unthinkable that AI could even do that (such a high strech)
I am surprised that it did that and I am just left feeling technically impressed. This is insane.
The more AI starts demonstrating its capabilities, the harder it just becomes to imagine what thing would genuinely impress us next. (We need a term for this as I have observed it from the trend of [waiting for AI to write adobe] -> [waiting for AI to write assembly] etc.)
Especially when coming from a long career in CS, seeing such quick and positive results blows my mind.
I'm still learning but this is fun as fuck.
It is still very surprising though, considering it apparently displays an "intuitive" understanding of the weights, that make whatever Goodfire did look like primitive monkeys poking at it by comparison.
FYI, Nick/Goodfire used the models extensively in their work, so it's very possible that there were some similarities in their work. I'm really curious to see his response to this.
lisp people will be in awe
I'll chalk up never even having thought of this being an option as yet another instance my human hubris, and a warning sign.
Whoa. What the absolute fuck is going on here.
It's very impressive, but also very expected.
That an LLM was trained on various policy weights, along with labels of what that policy does (not labelled directly, but indirectly) and is then able to guess what game a policy is trained for purely from its weights, and one-shot generate weights for these games, means that there is some way to compress/recover/represent what an NN has learned purely from its weights, which is what interpretability is all about. Potentially, it could reveal interpretability tools much better than the ones we use today.
Edit: tweets from one of the coauthor providing more context: