The interpretation here is not so much that an LP can do Astra's work -- after all the Astra prompt was "improve Qwen's math by changing weights" or similar. Instead, it's that with some guidance (eliminate this behavior, preserve that behavior, as expressed through linear constraints) the solver is much more efficient than Astra's trial and error. So essentially the solver would be a way of cutting through all the time consuming stuff and expressing Astra's intent more immediately. And then presumably Astra could iterate on that to a better solution.
The use of an LP solver here is a really cool insight.
It’s possible to make a differential work through those too in a useful sense, which allows their integration to be at a more fundamental level than post training bolt-on, but that’s not friendly to mass gpu parallel training without some serious work.
A conversation with an engine that thinks with the power of constraint solvers “baked in” instead of having to be brow beaten into approximate truth and iterated millions of times to care to even try to follow through to it. Wow that’s almost all I ever wanted. Here’s my word problem, go do the actual reasoning, hand waive until you’ve got enough expressive power to make an answer but if you can see a formal structure state it natively and let an actual solver spit out the (unification/feasible space/etc) back into token space that the llm picks back up on.
Astra didn't directly edit the weights, it came up with a method to edit the weigths?
So, it used another tool to edit the weights?
This kind of seems like saying, I don't directly edit the bits on my hard drive, thus i'm not really the one saving a file?
It would be extremely surprising for a model to be able to ingest all model weights in a prompt and output better model weights, with no tool calls. While certainly possible for small simple models (eg a 4-parameter perception), at scale this becomes difficult in terms of near-perfect recall at huge context size and requires a superhuman intuitive understanding of linear algebra.
On the other hand, it is extremely unsurprising that a model can edit weights when having access to unrestricted tools, time, and resources (including non-public resources that the AI labs have). The methodology is fairly simple: just train the model more on whatever better non-public datasets. Hell, just benchmaxx the smaller model, that would be "a method to edit the weights" that achieves the necessary results.
I think everyone would agree that these two scenarios are very different. Where the actual Astra weight-space programming result falls on this spectrum is debatable.
I suppose the argument is that "editing weights" seems to imply a complex awareness of what each weight means, which is material for AGI hype. Really it's just doing very broad statistics, which is of course interesting but hardly unexpected.
Though, even on re-read, it sure seems like Astra was making some decisions, otherwise what is this saying, that Astra knew how to download some linear algebra tools?
(*) scarequotes because the LLMs that suggested these approaches have presumably been exposed to the refusal direction suppression work
Could Astra edit itself?
Basically the weight edit approach is find a semantic direction for the undesirable behavior and steer away from it. With access to the weights I see no reason a model (even one as large as Astra) couldn’t apply that principle to itself. This probably includes at runtime if you wanted to give the model write access to itself
It's not clear if this would generalize to other related uses, or how disastrous it would be to unrelated uses, but it's worth studying. Feels like a sort of agentic Lamarckism.
??
Essentially modern LLMs are able to do normal AI engineering tasks, like running optimization algorithms over weights. The media has been inaccurately describing this as if the AI had some special insight into the weights, when it reality it just performed the tasks a human engineer might do.