New Paper Teaser: Pre-training with Zero Order

ycombinator · x · 2026-07-17

This post shares a teaser for an upcoming paper with a radical core claim: you don't need transformers or backprop to do pre-training; Zero Order works too.

The poster notes that the results are "very impressive" and could inspire new architectural directions, making the inference phase more CPU-bound rather than IO-bound. Overall, this is a cutting-edge research preview, with full details awaiting the official paper release.

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