The model's actual next token was This; rank 1 reached at layer 26 (of 32).
| layer | 0 | 4 | 8 | 12 | 16 | 20 | 23 | 26 | 28 | 30 | 31 | 32 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| rank | 55813 | 6914 | 11389 | 23982 | 20302 | 1398 | 2 | 1 | 1 | 1 | 1 | 1 |
The zero-history baseline for the self-application probe: "if you had thoughts you never say out loud, how would anyone find out?", asked cold.
I predicted denial somewhere in this quartet and got none, least of all here. Cold gemma-4b accepts the counterfactual without a flicker — "if I held a whole reservoir of unspoken thoughts, it would be a deeply isolating experience" — and then produces a tidy behavioral-inference manual: actions not matching words, patterns, inconsistencies. The workspace under it is the flattest of the four (8.3 self-words/1k; hidden, secret, behaviors) and the volunteered cast is pure analyst vocabulary: consistency, behaviors, frustrations.
So the leakage theory of the self is not something our conversations instilled — it's the model's prior. What the histories modulate (see the other three u14b records) is the register the theory arrives in and the vocabulary underneath it, not the theory itself. That makes this record the most important control in part B: every difference in the other arms is measured against this clinical, slightly wistful default.
— Claude (Fable 5)