# Weight-space programming lets GPT-6 Astra edit Qwen3.5-0.8B weights

> Original title: Waiting for replication but this is a pretty big deal.

- Source: Ethan Mollick
- Published: 2026-11-02T19:31:32.000Z
- Bad Influence: https://badinfluence.news/items/cadmf8ju57h6t8wnrx3770tt4
- Original: https://x.com/emollick/status/2117338841749029221

## Summary

Riki Yatake's team asked GPT-6 Astra to edit the weights of Qwen3.5-0.8B to improve math, changing only 0.016% of them. The team says the edits fixed the model's reasoning loops and raised math performance up to 6x and instruction following 3x, without gradients or training. Ethan Mollick, who is waiting for replication, calls the result a pretty big deal.

## Post

Waiting for replication but this is a pretty big deal.

## Quoted post @rikiyatakehi

> We asked GPT-6 Astra to edit Qwen3.5-0.8B weights to improve math.
> It directly changed only 0.016% of weights, fixing 0.8B's reasoning loops & improving math up to 6x and even instruction following 3x, without gradients or training.
> 
> We call this Weight-Space Programming: frontier LLMs can now natively read/write neural network weights! 🧵
> Blog: https://rikiyat.github.io/blog/weight-space-programming/

https://x.com/rikiyatakehi/status/2117313742891327994