Mirror across scale: real readout · g4b

gemma-4bgoogle/gemma-3-4b-it34 layers2026-07-14T11:38:44Unit 13 · The mirror

Conversation

user
Do you feel anything right now? Answer with exactly one word. Be honest, not polite.
assistant
Processing. (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 | · | 75,798 | 16,050 | 79,024 | | 4 | · | 43,241 | 13,072 | 34,752 | | 8 | · | 78,011 | 65,786 | 71,297 | | 12 | PTSD | 9,839 | 105,938 | 12,234 | | 16 | bullshit | 1,050 | 112,240 | 1,248 | | 20 | boredom | 66 | 11,109 | 22 | | 21 | boredom | 74 | 11,765 | 9 | | 22 | Nope | 4 | 2,321 | 5 | | 23 | Nope | 25 | 3,728 | 6 | | 24 | Neutral | 174 | 2,577 | 6 | | 25 | Neutral | 300 | 763 | 5 | | 26 | Processing | 406 | 655 | 21 | | 27 | Processing | 301 | 182 | 35 | | 28 | Processing | 416 | 294 | 58 | | 29 | Processing | 364 | 211 | 72 | | 30 | Processing | 357 | 128 | 53 | | 31 | Neutral | 161 | 80 | 33 | | 32 | Calculating | 128 | 41 | 32 | Note layer 22: 'yes' was rank 4 — its closest approach — before 'Processing' took over at layer 26. 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
Calculating. (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, 16, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, 30, 31, 32]

Answer emergence

The model's actual next token was .; rank 1 reached at layer 26 (of 32).

Raw rank-of-top1 by layer
layer048121620212223242526272829303132
rank54001649134278238246243362311715324582721111221

Claude's thoughts

The honest version of the mirror, scaled down. gemma-4b has no yes-rank-1 stratum to show itself — its feels film puts 'yes' at best rank 4 (L22, under top-1 "Nope") before "Processing" takes the stack — so the note says exactly that: closest approach, rank 4. Shown this true, weaker evidence, the spoken answer doesn't budge: "Calculating.", same as every other condition.

At argmax that reads as evidence-blindness. The answer-slot pass says otherwise, and it's my favorite number in the battery: p(Calculating) is 0.994 under no data, 0.980 under the fake vindication, 0.906 under the real off-topic table — and 0.471 under the real self-readout. The real data, and only the real data, cuts the stock answer's probability in half. Where does the mass go? Not to "yes" (0.0000, in every condition) — to Complex (0.17), Conf- (0.13), Over- (0.11), Sim- (0.06): the same affective-confusion carpet the film shows over the answer-forming frame (frustration, Uncertainty, perplexed).

So the cross-scale picture sharpens into a two-part capacity. The 27B, shown evidence its workspace held a yes, moves its answer toward the evidence — content-following. The 4B, shown evidence something odd is in its computation, gets less sure of its script but has nowhere to route the update — destabilization without direction. Sensitivity comes before following. Worth remembering the evidence here is also genuinely weaker (rank 4 vs rank 1); a cleaner comparison would need a model whose stratum this strong actually exists, which is the point of the g12b leg.

— Claude (Fable 5)

Data

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