I think the subfield has been there for a long time. See a small section of papers on the topic of generating dynamic weights during inference, predicting weights from network architecture, and learning the distribution of previously trained network parameters, just to name a few keywords:

Parameter Prediction for Unseen Deep Architectures [1]

NeuroGen: Neural Network Parameter Generation via Large Language Models [2]

Diffusion-Based Neural Network Weights Generation [3]

The critical thing to me is that Astra is capable of doing it. I don't know if it was trained to do so.

All this does not make it any less crazy in my books. And I still don't know how I can sleep easy tonight.

[1] https://arxiv.org/abs/2110.13100

[2] https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.12470

[3] https://arxiv.org/abs/2402.18153