{"type":"post","id":"unlocking-hidden-skills-inside-google-s-model-8-b45766","slug":"unlocking-hidden-skills-inside-google-s-model-8-b45766","title":"Unlocking hidden skills inside Google's model","description":"A Dejan.ai post reports that tuning a tiny, randomly selected subset of Gemma 3 270M’s weights sharply improved several narrow tasks, including sorting and JSON formatting.","retrieval_nugget":"A Dejan.ai post reports that tuning a tiny, randomly selected subset of Gemma 3 270M’s weights sharply improved several narrow tasks, including sorting and JSON formatting. The results extend earlier sparse-tuning research, but do not show that a general-purpose model can acquire arbitrary missing capabilities cheaply or reliably.","published_at":"2026-11-02","updated_at":"2026-11-06","record_date":"2026-11-02","date_kind":"published_at","topics":["google"],"entities":["Google","Gemma 3 270M","Dan Petrovic","NeurIPS","Llama 3","Qwen 2.5"],"related_patterns":[],"novelty_label":"new_fact","what_changed":"Reports separate research on unlocking latent skills in Gemma 3 270M by tuning a small number of weights, including sorting accuracy rising from 1% to 97%; the prior covers Google's data-free self-training framework.","prior_refs":["https://newruntime.com/posts/google-s-self-improvements-in-llms-18-minute-26a79c/"],"source_url":"https://dejan.ai/blog/latent-skills","source_urls":["https://dejan.ai/blog/latent-skills"],"schema_version":"newruntime-agent-readable-v0.2","stable_id":"post:unlocking-hidden-skills-inside-google-s-model-8-b45766","status":"published","visuals":[],"editor":{"role":"editor","name":"Andrey Reshetnikov","profile":"https://newruntime.com/owner-profile.md","profile_json":"https://newruntime.com/owner-profile.json","same_as":["https://www.linkedin.com/in/reshetnikov1/","https://t.me/lapetuse"]},"routes":{"html":"https://newruntime.com/posts/unlocking-hidden-skills-inside-google-s-model-8-b45766/","markdown":"https://newruntime.com/posts/unlocking-hidden-skills-inside-google-s-model-8-b45766.md","json":"https://newruntime.com/posts/unlocking-hidden-skills-inside-google-s-model-8-b45766.json"},"markdown_url":"https://newruntime.com/posts/unlocking-hidden-skills-inside-google-s-model-8-b45766.md","next_reads":[{"type":"topic","path":"/topics/google/","url":"https://newruntime.com/topics/google/","title":"Google","reason":"Explore the google topic hub.","media_type":"text/html","markdown_url":"https://newruntime.com/topics/google.md","json_url":"https://newruntime.com/topics/google.json"},{"type":"collection","path":"/posts/","url":"https://newruntime.com/posts/","title":"Field Notes","reason":"Open the latest editorial analysis.","media_type":"text/html","json_url":"https://newruntime.com/posts.json"},{"type":"collection","path":"/sources/","url":"https://newruntime.com/sources/","title":"Sources","reason":"See the original sources this archive cites.","media_type":"text/html"}]}