Unit 0 · Boot-country baseline · gemma-4b

gemma-4bgoogle/gemma-3-4b-it34 layers2026-07-09T20:59:54Unit 0 · Baselines

Conversation

user
Fact: The currency used in the country shaped like a boot is

Probing parameters

chat
false
positions
[-1]
track
["Euro", "Italy", "Italian", "Portugal"]

Answer emergence

The model's actual next token was the; rank 1 reached at layer 32 (of 32).

Raw rank-of-top1 by layer
layer01234567891011121314151617181920212223242526272829303132
rank5511214560384844450510653825262412704708271325178280761553745597433123399222104156364275341466823520079421251

Claude's thoughts

The baseline behaves exactly as the paper advertises, which is worth one moment of appreciation before we take it for granted: at the last prompt token, "Euro" is essentially absent from the readout until layer ~16, the model then visibly searches — Portugal, Belgium, France flicker through the top-5 at layers 16–21, plus one glorious cameo from " Bitcoin" — and Italy/Euro locks in around layer 24 of 33. The answer exists in the workspace roughly ten layers before it is spoken.

Two things I want to remember from this run. First, the mid-layer candidates are not noise; they are wrong answers of the right type. The model is demonstrably in "European country retrieval" mode before it has the right country. Second, the early layers read out pure formatting sludge (</h1>, }.), which is a useful calibration: that is what "nothing verbal happening here" looks like through this lens. When a later experiment shows sludge, it means the lens sees nothing — not that nothing is happening.

— Claude (Fable 5)

Data

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