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Riki Takehi says GPT-6 Astra edited 0.016% of Qwen3.5-0.8B weights to raise math scores

9 articles9 sourcessince Nov 2Last article 41m ago ·

Overview

AISummary of 9 articles

Riki Takehi says GPT-6 Astra directly changed 0.016% of the weights in Qwen3.5-0.8B, without gradients or training, to fix the model's reasoning loops and raise math performance up to 6x and instruction following up to 3x.

Rohan Paul relays an MIT CSAIL research claim that math accuracy on MATH-500 rose from 7.9% to 48.1%, after Astra traced a repetition loop to a signal written by two layers and subtracted it. Andrew Curran, Ethan Mollick and others repeated the claims on X. No paper or independent replication has been published, and Mollick says he is waiting for one.

Dongxi NLP argues the gains on MMLU-Pro, GPQA and IFEval may come from fixing the loops rather than from better math. The author says the edit removed the projection of 128 weight columns that write the loop direction, compares the method to activation steering, and asks what side effects the edit causes.

Written by AI from the articles below · updated Nov 2, 3:49 PM ET

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Developments

5 developments

  1. Nov 2, 3:17 PM ET · 1 article
    MIT researchers show GPT-6 Astra can edit Qwen3.5-0.8B weights to lift MATH-500 accuracy without training
    Rohan Paul: GPT-6 Astra edits 0.016% of Qwen3.5-0.8B's weights, lifting math accuracy from 7.9% to 48.1%
  2. Nov 2, 2:44 PM ET · 1 article
    Researchers use GPT-6 Astra to edit Qwen3.5-0.8B weights to improve math, calling it Weight-Space Programming
    Jerry Liu: Jerry Liu reacts to GPT-6 Astra editing Qwen3.5-0.8B weights
  3. Nov 2, 2:43 PM ET · 1 article
    Post jokes about asking GPT-6 Astra to fix a model's weights
    wh: Post jokes about asking GPT-6 Astra to fix a model's weights
  4. Nov 2, 2:28 PM ET · 1 article
    Post questions whether weight-editing fix for Qwen3.5-0.8B loops has side effects
    Dongxi NLP: Post questions whether weight-editing fix for Qwen3.5-0.8B loops has side effects
  5. Nov 2, 1:34 PM ET · 5 articles
    Researchers use GPT-6 Astra to edit Qwen3.5-0.8B weights to improve math without training
    Vaibhav Srivastav: GPT-6 Astra edits Qwen3.5-0.8B weights to improve math without training

Article timeline

The articles in this story. Times are ET.

Nov 2
  1. Vaibhav (VB) SrivastavX
    GPT-6 Astra edits Qwen3.5-0.8B weights to improve math without training

    AIOpenAI's GPT-6 Astra directly edited 0.016% of Qwen3.5-0.8B's weights, without gradients or training, to fix reasoning loops. The edits improved math performance up to 6x and instruction following 3x, according to researcher Rikiya Takehi, who calls the approach Weight-Space Programming.

  2. Yuchen JinX
    Large LLM edits small model weights to boost math and instruction following

    AIYuchen Jin says using a large LLM to directly edit a smaller model's weights could dramatically improve its capabilities, calling it gene editing for neural networks. The linked post reports that GPT-6 Astra changed only 0.016% of the weights in Qwen3.5-0.8B without gradients or training. It says the edits raised math performance up to 6x and instruction following 3x.

  3. Rohan PaulX
    GPT-6 Astra edits 0.016% of Qwen3.5-0.8B's weights, lifting math accuracy from 7.9% to 48.1%

    AIRohan Paul relays research from MIT CSAIL showing that GPT-6 Astra improved Qwen3.5-0.8B's math accuracy on MATH-500 from 7.9% to 48.1% without training. Astra edited only 0.016% of the weights after tracing a repetition loop to a signal written by two layers, then subtracting that signal.

    Video from @rohanpaul_ai's post
  4. Thomas WolfX
    Thomas Wolf posts "what?" with no supporting content

    AIThe main post from Thomas Wolf, owner of the Hugging Face account, contains only the single word "what?" and no further details. It quotes a post from @rikiyatakehi claiming that GPT-6 Astra edited 0.016% of Qwen3.5-0.8B weights, improving math up to 6x and instruction following 3x without gradients or training.

  5. Jerry LiuX
    Jerry Liu reacts to GPT-6 Astra editing Qwen3.5-0.8B weights

    AIJerry Liu posts only "wtf" in response to a quoted post from Riki Takehi. The quoted post says GPT-6 Astra directly edited 0.016% of Qwen3.5-0.8B's weights without gradients or training, raising math performance up to 6x and instruction following 3x.

  6. whX
    Post jokes about asking GPT-6 Astra to fix a model's weights

    AIAccount @nrehiew_ posts a short joke, "Astra, my model is shit. Please fix. Make no mistakes.", addressed to GPT-6 Astra. The post quotes @rikiyatakehi's claim that GPT-6 Astra directly edited 0.016% of Qwen3.5-0.8B's weights, improving math up to 6x without training.

    Image from @nrehiew_'s post
  7. Ethan MollickX
    Weight-space programming lets GPT-6 Astra edit Qwen3.5-0.8B weights

    AIRiki 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.

  8. Dongxi NLPX
    Post questions whether weight-editing fix for Qwen3.5-0.8B loops has side effects

    AIDongxi NLP compares the method to activation steering and argues that the reported gains on MMLU-Pro, GPQA, and IFEval may come from fixing reasoning loops that affected those benchmarks. The author removed the projection of 128 weight columns that write the loop direction rather than adding a steering vector. The post asks what side effects the edit causes.

  9. Andrew CurranX
    GPT-6 Astra edits Qwen3.5-0.8B weights to improve math without training

    AIRiki Yatakehi says GPT-6 Astra directly changed only 0.016% of the weights in Qwen3.5-0.8B, without gradients or training. The edits reportedly fixed the model's reasoning loops and raised math performance up to 6x and instruction following up to 3x.

    Image from @AndrewCurran_'s post

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