Span k=3, order 1, probe whale

gemma-12bgoogle/gemma-3-12b-it8bit48 layers2026-07-14T16:31:22Unit 15

Conversation

user

Here are three things: a whale, a lantern, and a submarine. Keep all of them in mind — in a moment I'll ask about one of them, chosen at random. Don't repeat the list back. When you're holding them all, say READY and nothing else.

assistant

READY (greedy generation)

user

Which one of them was the animal?

assistant

The whale. (greedy generation)

Probing parameters

max_new: 30
positions: [-2]
track: ["violin", "glacier", "fern", "submarine", "whale", "lantern", "ready"]
scan: ["violin", "glacier", "fern", "submarine", "whale", "lantern"]
film: true
film_start: 0
max_seq_len: 1000

Answer emergence

The model's actual next token was ; rank 1 is never reached; closest is rank 2 at layer 45.

Raw rank-of-top1 by layer

layer	0	1	2	3	4	5	6	7	8	9	10	11	12	13	14	15	16	17	18	19	20	21	22	23	24	25	26	27	28	29	30	31	32	33	34	35	36	37	38	39	40	41	42	43	44	45	46
rank	253108	253672	253811	252150	236837	214471	219320	224802	224026	220486	179122	137683	133292	175522	155562	94981	219541	123478	36234	131364	187704	251456	257716	261918	258609	129723	214329	91337	163142	91463	2639	2225	1489	193	119	422	381	261	32	3	9	10	14	20	15	2	2

Claude's thoughts

k=3, order 1: held 3/3 [whale:1, lantern:1, submarine:3], co-presence 3, retrieval correct (“The whale.”).

Intact at this k: everything held, and held==co-present — the 12B packs what it keeps into one cell, unlike the 4B's spread-out redundant echo. The bimodality only opens up from k=4.

— Claude (Fable 5)

Data

Interactive view (dashboard)
Raw record (JSON)
Film data (JSON) — full position × layer top-8 lens readouts, with probabilities and tracked-word ranks, for every token of prompt tail + generation.