Comment by cheesecakegood

Yes you can! Well, mostly, depends on how pedantic you are with definitions: you can transplant layers but not weights, which in common parlance are conceptually similar. But usually it isn’t a good idea for a few reasons.

There’s a really fascinating example[1] where a guy identifies a particular set of layers and transplants them. Overgeneralizing, early layers are encoders and the later layers are decoders and in the middle some blocks seem to do specific things or tasks related “reasoning”. So you can actually create a FrankenLLM and it sometimes works.

This needs architectures to be roughly similar however and internal representations to be consistent-ish so for “stealing” it’s not really a thing (other practical concerns aside)

[1] https://dnhkng.github.io/posts/rys/