I don’t think this warrants too much surprise — in fact I am a bit surprised by the color of the reactions here. The tasks are standard, on small models and use weight-space reasoning based on very well-known Mech Interp literature. It’s been understood in Mech Interp research circles for some time that results on toy models on algorithmic tasks do not generalise. The weight space geometry that Astra exploits here is pretty standard and one feels like the authors here are being a bit dishonest with their framing to get people not into mech interp literature excited.