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points by mccoyb 4 days ago | 0 comments
Why do people keep calling this a paper?

It's a blog post which received feedback from collaborators.

It hasn't gone through the academic paper lifecycle ... the authors themselves refer to it as a post and as preliminary.

I feel like I'm taking crazy pills, but can we be precise when talking about work of this form? It started with referring to arXiv pre-prints as papers, and now we're at blog posts with an academic template as papers.

A paper is a fucking paper: something which has been vetted by the scientific community, with at least some form (often, a few rounds) of anonymous review from people outside your circle of collaborators

This is not there yet, and clearly so due to the various feedback from people (including the two pushback posts on HN) critiquing the lack of discussion about the existence of these techniques in mech interp, etc?

[–] simonw 4 days ago
Like you said, in the AI space a pre-print on arXiv is massively more likely than anything that's been through peer-review.

I called it a paper here because it's by people with an academic affiliation and is of comparable quality (if not better than) many of the other "papers" we see.

I also like it when a paper isn't a PDF. PDFs are a bad way of communicating information.

(I will note that the authors themselves didn't call it a paper, their own BibTeX reference calls it a "blog post":)

  @misc{takehi2026weightspace,
    title        = {{Sparks of Weight-Space Programming: LLMs can natively read \& write neural network weights}},
    author       = {Takehi, Rikiya and Teoh, Jayden and Zhang, Alex and Khattab, Omar},
    year         = {2026},
    month        = nov,
    howpublished = {\url{https://rikiyat.github.io/blog/weight-space-programming/}},
    note         = {Blog post}
  }
[–] mccoyb 4 days ago
Sure, I agree with point (3).

But for (1, 2), just to point out, neither of your criteria would pass muster in the scientific communities who are ultimately responsible for vetting this work, right?

The ideal is: we don't accept papers at NeurIPS (or wherever) because of affiliation, and the badge of "quality" is bestowed by peer review, from other scientists.

> is of comparable quality (if not better than)

But the posts that you refer to in your own post point out several ways in which the quality is not good ...

But, in any case, I find it a bizarre choice to call it a paper when the authors themselves do not refer to it as such. We can agree to disagree, but just offering feedback.

[–] simonw 4 days ago
You're right about this, but I don't regret my choice of words.

I admit that I don't think formal "papers" deserve their elevated status in today's information economy.

I think they add a whole lot of ceremony that usually results in a format that's harder to understand.

So me calling this a "paper" was a little bit of a dig!

[–] mccoyb 4 days ago
Of course, I agree with you in many respects - but I’ve found the academic paper lifecycle to be tremendously helpful in terms of polishing my contributions (admittedly, not in ML - but in PL / systems) and avoiding content which could be construed as “misleading”

You, being of sound mind, tried the technique and drew reasonable conclusions … but just look at the original post for this blog post: there are a large number of responses by people who clearly don’t understand the technique, missed the experimental weaknesses, couldn’t place the post into the lineage of mech interp results that preceded it … and will leave the discussion with the wrong impression.

In your mind, whose fault is that? Is that that the unavoidable cost of a field, moving too rapidly to engage in peer review?

In its ideal form, the paper lifecycle is not a gate, but a sharpening stone.

[–] simonw 4 days ago
I think we have a messy version of peer review playing out right now.

I'm not convinced the alternative - delaying publication by 6 months, keeping the new information available only to a much smaller group until then - would have been better.

All of that said, I did just update my own post to include "The paper (OK, the authors classify is as a “blog post”, but it’s paper-shaped) found that frontier models..." inspired by this conversation.

[–] mccoyb 4 days ago
Agreed! Now if the authors update their post in response — we’ll have a proper venue on our hands!
[–] cadamsdotcom 4 days ago
> PDFs are a bad way of communicating information.

They have the strength of one PDF being frozen & (mostly) treated online as immutable - compared to a webpage which might change, or a blog post which might be edited. If a PDF needs to be replaced there'll be a notice.

And the single-file nature of PDFs makes them more likely to sit in an archive not managed by the author (vs a blog) so they tend to live as long as the archive rather than the author's blog.

For something that needs to Be referenced by others those are useful properties - I'd argue they outweigh how good PDF is at communicating information.

[–] DoesntMatter22 4 days ago
It's not considered a paper until it's vetted by others?
[–] mccoyb 4 days ago
Yes: before that stage, it is often called a "pre-print" ... if it is not at the state of a "pre-print", then "blog post" ... :)
[–] davrosthedalek 4 days ago
In most fields of science, it's not a paper until it's accepted for publication in a journal. That normally includes peer review of some sort.
[–] NitpickLawyer 4 days ago
Yeah, that's not gonna happen in ML, where a positive result (even in blog form) can be (hopefully) trivially tested and confirmed.

From memory, yolo and roberta and ppo were initially rejected. After a quick google search, pagerank was initially rejected, word2vec got one weak and one strong reject in reviews, LSTM got rejected (90s but still), dropout, knowledge distillation, and many more such cases. All of these are extremely important, foundational and field defining papers that ended up on arxiv or other preprint places.

If that happened to those papers, there's 0 chance today that it'd be a good idea. The field is simply moving too fast, there's too much being published, and the "top venues" are simply swamped. Blog / preprint / carrier pigeon is ok atm, as long as someone can look at it, try it, and hopefully reproduce it.

[–] davrosthedalek 4 days ago
Yes, but I still think that a blog should have less weight (and I would also expect it to be less polished) than a preprint. I wouldn't necessarily expect that a blog has enough info in it to make it reproducible exactly, maybe just gets an idea across, while a preprint should be on the level of "the authors think a reviewer will accept it".
[–] hadlock 4 days ago
The technology is progressing so fast if there's not a breakthrough for three weeks, it's considered a red flag that the technology is stalling out. I'm not sure how fast academic papers typically take to run through the whole cycle, but it's not THAT fast. By the end of next week there will be six different agents and twenty startups working on this problem, and in two months Anthropic and OpenAI will have rolled it into their core product offering after aqui-hiring four of them. Two blog posts are equivalent to a paper for the next five years in this space, unfortunately.
[–] MisterMunchkin 4 days ago
Because nobody actually reviews papers anyway so it is irrelevant. That might have happened when you only had 12 papers a year and they were things like “gravity exists”, but when you get a million papers a day on topics like “the ethnocentric illusion of west-canadian yarn spinning”, nobody has time for that.