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?
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}
}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.
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