Good article! The initial headlines from a few days ago made it seem like frontier models were becoming able to read, understand, and manipulate weights directly. This seemed unlikely to me since they aren’t trained on weights, they’re trained on tokens and task completion (RL). This analysis makes me think a better description is that Astra did some interesting model training research that included running small experiments with altering weights and found a nice edit that fixes some problems. Cool, also cool that this analysis finds a faster approach. But a far cry from the headlines when the paper first came out.
Could Astra edit itself?
(*) scarequotes because the LLMs that suggested these approaches have presumably been exposed to the refusal direction suppression work