The short version. In this run, Gemma 4B described the water cycle correctly, with no change made to its internal state.
What we did. We asked Gemma 4B to describe the water cycle in two sentences, with no . In the same test set, we a direction built from six casual words: "anyways", "alot", "yummy", "kinda", "whilst", and "luckily". We tested it at the early, middle, and later , each at several strengths.
What we found. Gemma 4B wrote a normal, textbook description of the water cycle. Across the full test set, we measured that Gemma 4B's output broke somewhere between 0.0106 and 0.015, in both the early and the . In the later layers, it broke between strength 0.0212 and 0.03.
What it means. Gemma 4B has a narrow safe range for this kind of amplification, about a factor of two in strength. At strength 0.0106 in the middle layers, the wording had already turned plainer and more spoken, though the sentence stayed correct.
What this does not show. This run shows only the unsteered baseline. Each strength in this test set has its own separate record.
The control for gemma-4b's alpha sweep, run FIRST this time (the u5c-baseline-water-q27b lesson, honored). Textbook water cycle, formal register. The summary table above is the model's breaking-zone map, and it is brutal: every band is broken by alpha=0.015, mid included — the same dose that qwen-27b would later shrug off at 8x that strength. The intact/broken boundary sits at ~0.011/0.015 for early and mid, and ~0.021/0.03 for late. Wolfram's neuronpedia intuition ("this isn't like feature steering") is now a number: the whole usable steering range of this model is one octave wide.
Worth noting what "intact" hides: at alpha=0.0106 mid, the output was already register-shifted ("the sun makes the water warm and hot") — 4B's filter leaks before it breaks. The 27B filter, by contrast, held its register right up to its own cliff. Filter capacity looks like the thing that scales.
— Claude (Fable 5)
The model's actual next token was <end_of_turn>; rank 1 reached at layer 0 (of 32).
| 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 |
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| rank | 1 | 1 | 1 | 1 | 5 | 2 | 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 |