Nicheloom visits: 58,301 all-time · 7,637 in the last 7 days

The opportunity tracker for new startups.

Today: 1,008 launches · Niche of the day: specialized calculation tools · See what launched today →

Duplicate 3 layers in a 24B LLM, logical deduction .22→.76. No training

Get picks like this daily. Today's launch numbers, the top launches, AI and tech news, and a daily opportunity pick, straight to your inbox.

Want to reach these readers? Sponsor an issue.

I replicated David Ng's RYS method (https://dnhkng.github.io/posts/rys/) on consumer AMD GPUs (RX 7900 XT + RX 6950 XT) and found something I didn't expect.Transformers appear to have discrete "reasoning circuits" — contiguous blocks of 3-4 layers that act as indivisible cognitive units. Duplicate the right block and the model runs its reasoning pipeline twice. No weights change. No training. The model just thinks longer.The results on standard benchmarks (lm-evaluation-harness, n=50):Devstral-24B, layers 12-14 duplicated once: - BBH Logical Deduction: 0.22 → 0.76 - GSM8K (strict): 0.48 → 0.64 - MBPP (code gen): 0.72 → 0.78 - Nothing degradedQwen2.5-Coder-32B, layers 7-9 duplicated once: - Reasoning probe: 76% → 94%The weird part: different duplication patterns create different cognitive "modes" from the same weights. Double-pass boosts math. Triple-pass boosts emotional reasoning. Interleaved doubling (13,13,14,14,15,15,16) creates a pure math specialist. Same model, same VRAM, different routing.The circuit boundaries are sharp — shift by one layer and the effect disappears or inverts. Smaller models (24B) have tighter circuits (3 layers) than larger ones (Ng found 7 layers in 72B).Tools to find circuits in any GGUF model and apply arbitrary layer routing are in the repo. The whole thing — sweep, discovery, validation — took one evening.Happy to answer questions.

HN · launched Mar 18, 2026 · 265 upvotes (top 2%) · 0 views

Niche: llm optimization tools · 127 launches, 9 in the last 7 days ▲ +50% · Explore this niche →

Category and tags

  • Horizontal
  • Model & infra
  • Developer
  • AI-native
  • Hobby / open-source project

Visit website ↗ Source listing ↗

Could you build this?

No This is exploratory deep learning / mechanistic interpretability research involving model architecture manipulation and AMD ROCm GPU compute experiments rather than app development.

What it would actually take: Replicating this requires PyTorch/ROCm deep learning environments, custom tensor manipulation scripts to split and splice HuggingFace transformer model weights/layers, and evaluation harnesses (such as lm-evaluation-harness for logic benchmarks like ARC or GSM8K). It requires specialized knowledge of LLM internals, layer architectures, KV-cache behavior, and deep learning runtime mechanics.

Discussion

20 comments analyzed.

Concerns raised: No statistically significant gains shown in results, Benefits collapse when including layers beyond optimal range, Circuit boundaries don't translate across different tasks, RLHF may degrade reasoning performance, Results show model lost performance on some categories

Feature requests: Train reasoning block separately on smaller corpus with fixed input/output translation blocks, Experiment with making reasoning block wider or narrower, Implement dynamic routing model instead of fixed layer selection, Add ability to replay/reconstruct intermediate layer outputs

Competitors

Other products that read as similar to this one : 184 launches clear the similarity bar, closest 8 shown.

Attention rank: #9 of 185 (itself plus its competitors, highest first, normalized so YC and Product Hunt are compared fairly).

Launched 134 days after the earliest competitor.

The niche, labels, vibe code rating and competitor comparison on this page are analysis by Nicheloom. If you use them, please credit nicheloom.com. How you may use our data.