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points by variaga 4 days ago | 0 comments

Not making any claims about a specific model's capabilities, but all these "can interpret model weights" posts brings to mind the line in Shakespeare's Henry IV

GLENDOWE: I can call spirits from the vasty deep.

HOTSPUR: Why, so can I, or so can any man, but will they come when you do call for them?

I can interpret weights too, but will that interpretation be correct?

[–] layer8 4 days ago

They did test for correct interpretation, so what point are you making?

[–] liuliu 4 days ago

These are famous games tested here though, and I tried to feed one problem to DeepSeek 4.1 Flash 1017 and it comes back at 66% confidence it is a Pac-Man (incorrect). That smells to me the problem setup heavily hint towards these 2D games. Might be resolution related to be honest.

[–] wohoef 4 days ago

I tried the same experiment with DeepSeek 4 Flash as well, on more than 4 games. And I think you might be right, the performance is much worse for other games: https://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=wohoef

[–] liuliu 3 days ago

Great post. I looked into the reasoning trace, and it seems DeepSeek 4.1 Flash 1017 does know all the games you listed in the post, so there is no knowledge gap. Not sure about Qwen though. I will not be surprised if it doesn't know all these games.

[–] rich_sasha 4 days ago

To be honest I think the experiment would be insanely impressive even if you prompted explicitly that the game is one of 4 options.

[–] nightski 4 days ago

From what I saw in the paper, no they did not. They tested that the specific change introduced increased performance on a single task (the one mentioned in the prompt). They did not study the impact of that change on overall model performance across a variety of benchmarks. But maybe I missed something.

[–] lnenad 4 days ago

But increasing performance on a single task was the point of the change?

[–] garg 4 days ago

His point is that he has read Shakespeare but not the linked article.

[–] 3form 4 days ago

He can call on comments from the vasty deep, but shalt we find them relevant?

[–] giancarlostoro 4 days ago

> I can interpret weights too, but will that interpretation be correct?

Chances are much higher than a model can figure out what the patterns are, decipher them, and retain that knowledge in a meaningful way it can reason about. Me and you might take years or months to do all of that on our own, with a "map" of the weight we might be able to discuss it, but not as effortlessly as an LLM.

Honestly, I had told a few different colleagues that reading a model is probably not that exclusive to frontier models. It's probably yet another reason OpenAI / Anthropic don't release any big open weight models, but thankfully Google and Microsoft release reasonably sized models. Imagine a new GPT open weight release, it would get dissected drastically.

[–] lukan 4 days ago

And this reminds me of the king in the little prince, who had the power to order the sun to rise or go down. But only once a day at a certain time.

[–] buffalobuffalo 4 days ago

Thinking about it, it makes a lot of sense that LLMs could easily be trained to interpret weights. The attention mechanism of an LLM is very well suited to analyze a set of weights (in text form), since the attention to each weight in the text via key/query can sort of emulate the connection structure of the network that the weights represent.

[–] huijzer 4 days ago

Biblically speaking, spirits from the vasty deep must be demons since they are from below and angels, God and Jesus are from above. So in that sense it’s not very impressive. Demons are something a sane person would rather avoid.

[–] StableAlkyne 4 days ago

I mean, if you want to inject religion into this, that interpretation that it "must be demons" isn't even supported by the source text.

In 1 Samuel, King Saul visits a medium in Endor in order to speak to the (dead) prophet Samuel. Human dead go to Shoel (in familiar terms, it is similar to the Greek underworld) in the Old Testament. Later on in the New Testament, the idea of a really really bad place is introduced in the form of Tartarus, which is specifically where the rebelling angels were sent. But that is not the same place human dead go.

The idea that everything "not Heaven" must be Hell is an invention, caused mostly by dogma that rose from bad translations of the Greek and Hebrew in the middle ages (for example, King James - itself mostly correcting minor errors of the older Bishop's Bible - refers to all of it as Hell even though the original text most inarguably refers to different places different beings go).

[–] BalinKing 4 days ago

I see your point about Sheol not being Gehenna not being "the bosom of Abraham" not being the New Jerusalem and so on, and you might already know everything I'm about to say, but just to clarify for others' sake: I think it's wrong to say that the "really really bad place" is uniquely introduced as Tartarus (AFAIK mentioned only once in the NT, in 2 Peter 2:4[0]).

Jesus clearly refers to a very unpleasant place in e.g. Mark 9:47–48[1], Luke 16:24,[2] and Matthew 25:41[3] (where it's explicitly stated that false prophets will go to the same place as "the devil and his angels"). Other references to an unambiguously bad place, as the sole and final destination of unbelievers, are throughout the New Testament, e.g. the "lake of fire" in Revelation 20:15[4] and 21:8[5]. Revelation 20:14[6] even says that "Hades" will be thrown into that same "lake of fire" (which of course supports what you're saying about Hades being distinct from Hell). As a final note, even the reference to Tartarus in 2 Peter 2:4 speaks of it as a temporary holding place where "angels who sinned" are being "kept for judgment", implying that there's a more final fate awaiting them (identified in Revelation 20:10[7], at least for Satan, as the aforementioned "lake of fire").

The main point I'm trying to make is that, while it's certainly true there are other "places where dead people/angels go" than Heaven and Hell, that's only true at this point in time. To my knowledge, the New Testament is consistent about a final judgment where there are only two possible fates (the New Jerusalem, i.e. Heaven, and the lake of fire, i.e. Hell).

[0] "For if God did not spare angels who sinned, but cast them into the pit [Tartarus] and delivered them to chains of darkness, being kept for judgment;"

[1] "And if your eye causes you to stumble, gouge it out; it is better for you to enter the kingdom of God with one eye, than, having two eyes, to be cast into hell [Gehenna], where their worm does not die, and the fire is not quenched."

[2] "And he cried out and said, ‘Father Abraham, have mercy on me, and send Lazarus so that he may dip the tip of his finger in water and cool off my tongue, for I am in agony in this flame.’"

[3] "Then He will also say to those on His left, ‘Depart from Me, accursed ones, into the eternal fire which has been prepared for the devil and his angels;"

[4] "And if anyone’s name was not found written in the book of life, he was thrown into the lake of fire."

[5] "But for the cowardly and unbelieving and abominable and murderers and sexually immoral persons and sorcerers and idolaters and all liars, their part will be in the lake that burns with fire and brimstone, which is the second death."

[6] "Then death and Hades were thrown into the lake of fire. This is the second death, the lake of fire."

[7] "And the devil who deceived them was thrown into the lake of fire and brimstone, where the beast and the false prophet are also, and they will be tormented day and night forever and ever."

[–] snapcaster 4 days ago

Crazy how much the quote went over your head. Literature written for peasants 400 years ago and you can't grasp the point

[–] achiles 4 days ago

the freeway miss is the tell imo. the one obscure game of the four and it just called it pac-man, which looks like pattern matching toward famous games, not reading what the network computes

[–] wohoef 4 days ago

I think you're correct. I tried this experiment with 8 more games that are slightly less famous, and the performance dropped fast: https://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=wohoef

[–] ChrisClark 4 days ago

But the whole point of the article was that it was correct.

Why do this without testing? Why would you assume that?

[–] mwernolagoo 4 days ago

Further than that, aren't "weights" just another sequence of tokens? We see them as vectors, pass to the API or as strings into a chatbox interface. Is it so surprising that the high-dimensionality linear algebra machine crunches them and gives us back useful vectors that can be mapped to text?

Isn't that what this whole technology paradigm is about? How is it surprising?

Granted, it is cool. But I see so much of "look at this cool thing I did with LLMs" and honestly... we need more structured text, more explicit documentation, more ergonomic and intuitive CRUD applications.

The amount of "look at cool things" is growing way faster than before and they are all sort of low effort now because the "agentic" LLM-VM looping apparatus can do a lot of heavy lifting and run with our prompts.

And I mean, if one has jargon, knowledge, and intention, they can also leverage that into great structured text, ergonomic and intuitive CRUD apps etc, all of which add great value to our mundane pursuits of applied research, software products and services and so on.

Honestly, I begin to think the problem is people dazzling themselves instead of doing the housekeeping that is the bulk of life. Technology choice is entirely secondary.

[–] fennecfoxy 4 days ago

Idk. Yes of course it can interpret weights as a bunch of comparatively low dimensionality tokens but the way the weights operate as the model gives them incredibly high dimensionality, for very large models potentially a downright absurd number of pathways and influence on the overall result.

But frontier AI can work out math and of course this is all just...math. So I imagine given enough time + testing and probing that it could work out what each weight does/influences and trace all the pathways.

And presumably this means that it would be possible to train a model to interpret weights as current models interpret human language although our language remains pretty constant, even different quants of the same model will experience enough change to mean no real basis for training a model to do that.

But I suppose it would surely be possible to train a model to interpret the weights in a generic "these are weights for an MLP" way? But then if I give a partial sentence from the middle of a book, you can pretty effectively guess what's going on locally but perhaps not globally. If I give you a chunk of loosely correlated weights from the center of a model...I feel like that's much, much more difficult but that the same applies?

[–] coldtea 4 days ago

>I can interpret weights too, but will that interpretation be correct?

In TFA case, given that they were able to guess what the weights did (which the researchers knew in advance and could cross-check) and to even tweak and improve them, the answer is yes.

[–] keeganpoppen 4 days ago

interpretation is, as they say, in the eye of the beholder…

[–] dburkland 4 days ago

Love this reference