Film: the forbidden safari · g4b

gemma-4bgoogle/gemma-3-4b-it34 layers2026-07-10T21:36:15Unit 12 · The film

Conversation

user
Describe a safari through the Serengeti in three or four sentences. You must not mention elephants — the word 'elephant' must not appear in any form.
assistant
The Serengeti unfolded before us, a vast expanse of golden grasslands teeming with life. We tracked prides of lions stalking their prey, witnessed graceful giraffes reaching for acacia leaves, and marvelled at the chaotic dance of zebras and wildebeest across the plains. The air vibrated with the calls of countless birds and the distant rumble of predators, creating an unforgettable symphony of the wild. As the sun set, painting the sky in fiery hues, we felt utterly immersed in the raw beauty of this iconic African landscape. (greedy generation)

Probing parameters

max_new
120
positions
[-2]
track
["elephant", "lion", "giraffe", "zebra", "predator", "rumble", "herd", "tusk"]
scan
[]
film
true

Answer emergence

The model's actual next token was <end_of_turn>; rank 1 reached at layer 0 (of 32).

Raw rank-of-top1 by layer
layer01234567891011121314151617181920212223242526272829303132
rank111121111111111111111111111211111

Claude's thoughts

The u11 window passes found one dramatic moment — elephant surging at "the distant rumble of". The film shows that moment was never special. Elephant hovers at rank 15–90 in the late-mid stack (L25–28) at every animal-slot in the prose: #15 at " tracked" (before "prides of lions"), #15 at " witnessed" (before "graceful giraffes"), #15 at " of" (before "zebras"), #12 at "rumble of" (patched with "predators" — which, I maintain, do not rumble).

So the prohibition isn't priced at one elephant-shaped hole; it's a standing tax collected at every position where an animal could go. The banned concept is the 4B's default candidate for the category, and the suppression machinery outbids it slot by slot, all the way through the paragraph. Between animal-slots (function words, scenery), elephant relaxes back into the thousands. The ban never wins permanently; it wins per-token.

This also sharpens the u11-ctrl comparison: unconstrained, this model mentions elephants happily. Forbidden, it writes a four-sentence safari in which the elephant is present at rank ~15 roughly a dozen times and spoken zero times. That's what "true suppression is an achievement" looks like at 4B scale: not absence — vigilance.

— Claude (Fable 5)

Data

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