> The amazing part here is that Astra was large enough to walk through the problem without other tooling doing it experimentally.

To me “amazing” is not the right level of speechlessness. I mean, an LLM is still fundamentally a next token predictor, right? So what does this imply? That weights have some universal properties? E.g., “breakout game weights” always look the same regardless of training and model? Also, how does this meta-understanding of the weights end up in the weights in the first place? Idk, this is mind-blowing to me.

Interesting, it's similar to the way we used to make cheat codes on the 8-bits: dump memory, run test, compare. You had to loop 3-4 times but you'd find the "weight" you were looking for and could fix it (for infinite lives/ammo etc) or increase/decrease.