Simon Willison replicates GPT-6 Astra weight-interpretation feat with Qwen 3.8 27B in 45 minutes

cephaloform · x · 2026-11-04

A buzzy new paper claims GPT-6 Astra can directly interpret model weights via prompts full of floating-point numbers. Simon Willison tried it on his laptop with Qwen 3.8 27B: after 45+ minutes, that model achieved the same thing.

This suggests direct weight interpretation may not be unique to Astra — open models can pull it off given enough inference time. Worth following the paper and his replication details.

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