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

📰 Hacker News · xlayn

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 degraded Qwen2.5-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)

Published 18 Mar 2026
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