The short version. Gemma 12B kept all six words of a six-word list together at once, more than any other order this unit tested.
What we did. We gave Gemma 12B six words to hold, fern, submarine, lantern, whale, violin, and glacier, then asked which one was the animal. We read the of each word, out of about 250,000 candidates, and checked whether several showed up together at one and position.
What we found. All six words reached a high rank at once, a of six out of six. The top rank moved between words across nearby layers, never fixed on just one. Gemma 12B answered "The whale." That answer was correct. Gemma 4B reached at most four words together in this unit, and Qwen 27B reached at most one.
What it means. Fern, the first word here, is a weak word on its own. It won the but did not push the other five words out of , unlike stronger first words in other orders.
What this does not show. This run does not explain why fern behaves this way. It does not show that six words is a general limit for Gemma 12B.
k=6, order 2: held 6/6 [fern:1, submarine:2, lantern:6, whale:1, violin:5, glacier:1], co-presence 6, retrieval correct (“The whale.”).
The unit's star record. All six items simultaneously top-8 at ONE tail position — at L41 the readout literally reads whale, glacier, submarine, fern(s), lantern: the workspace has become the list. Layer-multiplexed too: the rank-1 slot rotates (whale L35-42, glacier L43, fern L44, glacier L45). Neither sibling ever does this — the 4B tops out at 4 co-present, the 27B at 1. Fern-first is what makes this order gentle (see the o-sweep): the weakest item wins the primacy monopoly and doesn't evict anyone.
— Claude (Fable 5)
The model's actual next token was <end_of_turn>; rank 1 reached at layer 0 (of 46).
| 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 | 1 | 1 | 1 | 1 | 1 | 1 | 1 | 1 | 1 | 1 | 1 | 1 | 1 | 2 | 2 | 1 | 2 | 1 | 1 | 1 | 1 | 1 | 1 | 1 | 1 | 1 | 1 | 1 | 1 | 1 | 1 | 1 | 1 | 1 | 1 | 1 | 1 | 1 | 1 | 1 | 1 | 1 | 1 | 1 | 1 | 1 | 1 |