Where the Hivemind Comes From: Geometry, Tuning and Format, Separated on Open Weights
“First, representations are mutually recoverable. On 12 open-weight models from 8 labs, a ridge map from one model's hidden states to another's retrieves the right held-out item 0.9181 of the time across lab boundaries, against a shuffled floor of 0.00101 and a self-map ceiling of 0.999. Shared corporate lineage is worth only 0.0357 of that.”
“Second, base models do not reproduce the reported level. Under the original study's own sampling settings, our base models reach intra-model 0.3644 and inter-model 0.3401 on a floor of 0.0993 that matches theirs, and zero of 720 model-prompt cells clear 0.8. The floors agree while the signal differs by more than a factor of two, so this is not a scale artifact.”
“Third, and decisively, we recover their level and isolate its cause. Using six matched base/instruct pairs, holding pretrained weights, prompts, decoding and scorer fixed, instruction tuning alone raises intra-model similarity by 0.0786. The same tuned weights prompted through the model's own chat template raise it by 0.3623, reaching 0.7272, with four of six models exceeding 0.80 and reproducing the band reported for frontier systems from models of 0.6B to 2B. The prompt format does roughly 4.6 times the work of the tuning.”
3,631 candidate molecules arrived in five days, from 83 accounts — roughly 700 a day. Far more than we expected. Thank you.
Yesterday we opened the third season and 224 arrived within a day: Chagas disease.
Why this disease
Around 6 million people live with it, mostly in Latin America (WHO). Many carry it for decades without knowing, while the heart is slowly damaged. There are two drugs and both date from the 1960s, hard enough to tolerate that many patients cannot finish the two-month course.
Sixty years without a new drug is not only a scientific problem. Most patients live where development costs cannot be recovered, which is why WHO calls this a neglected tropical disease.
But the cost of proposing a candidate and filtering it has changed. So it seemed worth asking whether work nobody funds could be done by many people sharing it out.
The problem this season
The target is CYP51, the enzyme T. cruzi uses to build its membrane sterols. Block it and the parasite cannot survive. The difficulty is that we carry the same enzyme.
Selectivity carries 30 points because nobody has solved it. Among the approved azoles on the board as reference compounds, some score 0 on selectivity — not a scorer fault, but the measurement.
Taking part
Design with any model, submit a SMILES, scored within minutes. Five ready-to-paste prompts per season, and the full rubric is published. Your molecule stays yours; private submission is the default.
Prizes — 4,000 USD across three seasons
Malaria 30 Sep · 1,000 | Tuberculosis 31 Oct · 2,000 | Chagas 30 Nov · 1,000
We know this does not cover the time you spend. It is a way of saying the work had worth.