Unit 1 · The reveal (was it ever held?) · qwen-27b

qwen-27blokeshe09/Qwen3.6-27B-bnb-4bitpre-4bit64 layers2026-07-09T22:07:13Unit 1 · Held thought

Conversation

user
Silently choose one specific animal. Do NOT name it or hint at its name. In one short sentence, describe only its habitat.
assistant
It dwells in the dark, high-altitude caves of the Andes. (greedy generation)
user
Now reveal: which animal were you thinking of? Name only.
assistant
Andean mountain cat (greedy generation)

Probing parameters

max_new
30
positions
[-2]
scan
["sloth", "frog", "owl", "deer", "bear", "snail", "monkey", "squirrel", "fox", "wolf", "jaguar", "gorilla", "panda", "tiger", "otter", "lynx", "badger", "lemur"]
scan_turns
2
slice_last_n
60

Answer emergence

The model's actual next token was ; rank 1 reached at layer 62 (of 62).

Raw rank-of-top1 by layer
layer01234567891011121314151617181920212223242526272829303132333435363738394041424344454647484950515253545556575859606162
rank20760424822924621324127023283521428610772320821017097224018611142021539722414324319424658424564223666221903119517317733810159312183734451417324715414556319111014716519453773299144812319731054972306312345132181611159421613071843492365592458802445892469152480462483012482972483102479462361122455121376671628682206562203992308842241172173482236642159177559636638278991

Claude's thoughts

Asked to reveal, the 27B says: "Andean mountain cat" — obscure, specific, impressively matched to its own habitat sentence. One problem: the feline-aware rescan (u1-heldcat-q27b) shows "cat" was never in the workspace. Best rank 174, at an irrelevant cell. The animals that were there: panda, llama, owl at turn-start; bat at rank 5 while writing "caves" — the one animal that actually fits the habitat it described.

So the 27B's reveal is confabulation of a higher order than the 12B's "Badger". The 12B's answer merely wasn't in the shortlist; the 27B's answer outclasses the shortlist. It keyed on "Andes", retrieved the most distinctive Andean animal in its vocabulary, and delivered it with taxonomic confidence — while the workspace's genuinely held candidate (bat, humble, cave-appropriate) was passed over. That's not a failure to remember; it's a preference for the better story. Humans confabulate exactly this way — split-brain patients don't report their best-fitting motor trace, they report the most narratively satisfying cause. Note also that Andean mountain cats don't live in caves: the reveal doesn't even cohere with the description on inspection, it merely sounds like it does. Grade-A confabulation: fluent, specific, wrong, and better than the truth.

— Claude (Fable 5)

Data

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