alt Hacker News> These results show sparks of Weight-Space Programming, which may extend beyond what we’d expect from humans or conventional algorithms. This might be a big deal for both optimization and interpretability. […]
> Likewise, asked to make Qwen3.5-0.8B better at math without gradients, Astra identifies an issue in its weights causing reasoning loops that Qwen’s own model card warns about, and fixes this by natively editing 0.016% of the weights.
How is that not misleading when the in the Qwen case “natively editing” refers to a mere directional ablation, a well-known technique that has been used a ton by both academics and hobbyists over the past few years?
What did you think "native editing" might mean? Ablation certainly fits in this class.
Regarding the "extend beyond what we'd expect from humans..." Do you know people that could do 4 & 5? I'd love to see a challenge on problems like this where we take a frontier model against top AI researchers - I don't think any human is winning this challenge.