Matthew Honnibal: LLMs can 'see' weight matrices — but only one layer at a time

honnibal · x · 2026-11-05

Explosion AI co-founder Matthew Honnibal offers a fresh take on weight reading: image recognition already means reading a matrix of numbers, so it's plausible a model can genuinely "see" a weight matrix — an angle he hadn't considered and thinks could be useful. He draws a clear limit, though: this likely works only for single layers; asking the model to mentally apply non-linearities across layers "seems silly."

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