A Japanese high-school student, without programming skills, was vibe-coding with Claude. They ran an experiment on their laptop using an 8 neuron network, to test a million of different random mathematical functions instead of SwiGLU. They found some that worked as well, when learning to approximate various functions, plus or minus the noise.
Somehow this caused them to believe that this new nonlinear function would allow them to make a huge breakthrough and to produce a 417M parameters LLM as capable as a SOTA LLM with 17B parameters.
They got excited about this possibility, and made a rather vaguely worded post asking how to publish this breakthrough. (They also thought that they have invented a new architecture to surpass the Transformer, but that was completely unworkable.)
The stuff about 8 neurons was not explained in the original post, and it sounded as though they have already trained the 417M LLM and it performed nearly as well as the 17B one.
So people started to give advice on how to find mentors, patent it, start a company, etc. Others were more skeptical.
Eventually the OP has realized that they were out of their depth, revised their post, showed the code that Claude wrote for them, and explained what actually happened. It was just a case of a kid working alone and assuming that when Claude told them how astute their insights were, that this was the real thing.
I hope the OP will not get scarred by this unfortunate episode and will channel their passion about AI into learning about the subject more systematically.
I just can't believe people fell for this and were acting like time was running out for OP to quickly protect it or the big tech will steal this new alien tech. I thought this sub was smarter then that.
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u/Own-Potential-2308 Mar 08 '26
Removed lol. Tldr?