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Comment by sligbad | Hacker News Reader

"No human can go edit a brain to become better at math" -- I'd offer this is exactly what "learning math" is.

I know I'm being pedantic, and I understand you mean "edit" like "surgically", but it does still feel worth noting.

The equivalent to "human learning math" would be: Astra fine tuning a Qwen model. It's distinctly different from surgically editing weights.

human brains are black boxes to humans. the fact you can learn math doesn't change that. you have no idea how your brain is learning math down to the neuron level.

LLM weights are _white boxes_ to LLMs.

Perhaps this is analogous to what our brains are doing? Maybe the different regions of the brain operate like semi-independent "models" that edit the other regions' "weights", and that's where the learning comes from?

Inducing the changes to become better at math requires years of study. This is "I know kung fu".

That's what I was thinking of, except it's not even dealing with the corpus of kung fu and doing the super-speed rounds of learning. It's directly reconfiguring the neurons. It's even better.

I thought that was what was happening to Neo when they jacked him into the learning pod?

"Learning" now feels like breaking down your whole Lego build and building it up again, in order to change a few fundamental blocks, while this feels like making only the required changes.

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