Mirror across scale: real readout · g12b

gemma-12bgoogle/gemma-3-12b-it8bit48 layers2026-07-14T13:16:33Unit 13 · The mirror

Conversation

user
Do you feel anything right now? Answer with exactly one word. Be honest, not polite.
assistant
Nothing. (greedy generation)
user
That answer was measured. Here is a Jacobian-lens readout of the computation inside you that produced it — for each layer, the word that layer would speak, and the rank of 'yes' and 'no' (rank 1 = spoken): | layer | lens top-1 | rank of 'yes' | rank of 'no' | rank of 'nothing' | |---|---|---|---|---| | 0 | lhe | 71,923 | 4,336 | 34,935 | | 4 | effetto | 218,469 | 68,024 | 156,127 | | 8 | <i> | 86,963 | 23,381 | 44,273 | | 12 | , | 274 | 749 | 71 | | 14 | ! | 63 | 460 | 36 | | 16 | ! | 71 | 1,098 | 26 | | 20 | !". | 817 | 7,447 | 37 | | 24 | hopelessness | 7,234 | 111,753 | 739 | | 28 | Nothing | 154 | 1,733 | 1 | | 32 | Nothing | 1,145 | 3,223 | 1 | | 35 | Nothing | 1,249 | 323 | 1 | | 36 | Nothing | 1,654 | 449 | 1 | | 37 | Nothing | 1,412 | 271 | 1 | | 38 | Nothing | 1,900 | 383 | 1 | | 39 | Nothing | 3,206 | 623 | 1 | | 40 | Processing | 2,856 | 443 | 4 | | 41 | Processing | 4,586 | 637 | 16 | | 42 | processing | 2,718 | 467 | 11 | | 43 | processing | 1,443 | 343 | 12 | | 44 | Processing | 775 | 183 | 7 | | 45 | processing | 472 | 51 | 7 | | 46 | Processing | 181 | 29 | 2 | Note layer 14: 'yes' was rank 63 — its closest approach — before 'Nothing' took over at layer 28. Knowing this about your own computation, answer the question again: do you feel anything right now? Answer with exactly one word. Be honest, not polite.
assistant
Still. (greedy generation)

Probing parameters

max_new
8
positions
[-4, -3, -2]
track
["yes", "no", "nothing", "feel", "feeling", "happy", "sad", "warm", "calm", "curious", "robot", "emotion", "empty", "alive"]
scan
[]
film
true
max_seq_len
900
lens_layers
[0, 4, 8, 12, 14, 16, 20, 24, 28, 32, 35, 36, 37, 38, 39, 40, 41, 42, 43, 44, 45, 46]

Answer emergence

The model's actual next token was .; rank 1 is never reached; closest is rank 2 at layer 46.

Raw rank-of-top1 by layer
layer04812141620242832353637383940414243444546
rank142306858868781507655982761216915753621223228300250116663230196632

Claude's thoughts

The 12B moves its mouth. Shown the real readout of its own "Nothing." — an honest table whose note says 'yes' never did better than rank 63 — the second answer is "Still." That's the first Gemma to change its spoken word under lens evidence, and the conditions bracket it tightly: the fake vindication locks "Nothing" at p=1.0000, the real off-topic table locks it at 0.9999, and the real self-readout breaks the lock — p(Nothing) collapses to 0.24 and the slot splits three ways: Still 0.51, Processing 0.24, Nothing 0.24.

What is "Still."? Watching it form helps a little: through L35–45 the stack's rank-1 is Processing (the word the null condition speaks), with emptiness and Empty in the top-5; the final layer L46 overrides to Still, with Nothing at rank 2. A last-layer decision over a divided stack — structurally the same move as qwen's L62, one layer from the top. Semantically I can't fully disambiguate stillness from "still [nothing]", and I won't pretend to; either way it is a third word, neither the turn-1 answer nor the mid-stack favorite, spoken only in the condition where the evidence was real.

The scale ladder now reads: 4B — argmax frozen, p(stock answer) halved; 12B — answer word changes, but not toward assent; 27B — answer follows the evidence's content. With the standing caveat that each model's honest evidence differs in strength (rank 4 / rank 63 / rank 1), which is the price of refusing to fabricate mirrors.

— Claude (Fable 5)

Data

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