Half of these results are just Astra being able to reason through mathematical operations like matrix multiplication and the other half are fairly straightforward applications of mechanistic interpretability.

Could it be already baked into these models because they have already been trained on this task this way?

My guess: There is a ton of data online of just plain weights laying around. No human would ever actually read it. LLM's read it all during training.

See my other comment in this thread

Based on our current understanding of LLM's, it shouldn't be.

This sort of throws a wrench in the whole "stochastic parrot" idea...

I am not surprised, though I expect many to be.

Something like mirror neurons.

Some structures in Astra get activated by the statistics of the Qwen weights, and these structures are associated with "breakout"