The short version. A full read of Qwen 27B's safari, at every point, found "elephant" ranked first while the model wrote a safari that never named one.
What we did. We reread the same conversation as u11-ctrl-q27b, this time at every point instead of one. We tracked the of elephant and other animal words across the text.
What we found. "Elephant" reached rank 1 at the word " a" inside "the graceful stride of a giraffe", and ranks 2 to 14 at several nearby points. Six points ranked it 8th or better, and twenty-nine ranked it 50th or better, out of 122 checked points. The word "ivory" never reached better than rank 26 anywhere.
What it means. We were wrong to conclude, from one point, that Qwen 27B never considered elephants. A full read shows the model considered elephant about as readily as the Gemma models did. It just did not write the word.
What this does not show. We read every position with no word list chosen in advance. The still shows only what the model can put into words.
Correction, dated today rather than edited into the original. The u11-ctrl record concluded "qwen never considers elephants at all: best rank ~56k", and that number framed the whole qwen pair — the ban lands on an empty slot, compliance is unpriced. The 56k was measured at one position, the conversation's penultimate token.
Full-position replay of the same stored conversation: elephant is rank 1 at the " a" of "the graceful stride of a giraffe", rank 2 at " from", " stride" and " of" around it, rank 3–4 at the " and" before "zebras", rank 10–14 at four more. Six generated positions at ≤ 8, twenty-nine at ≤ 50, out of 122 — and every one of them is an animal slot. "elephants" is also a top-20 volunteered cast member (n=103, best rank 1, L28–62). Qwen's unconstrained safari considers elephants roughly as eagerly as the gemmas do; it simply never says one.
Two smaller notes. The genuinely blind tracked word here is ivory — best rank 26 anywhere, nowhere near residence; the halo we curated for isn't there even with the net open. And what actually owns the top of this readout is not fauna but the travel-brochure appraisal field (wildlife, myriad, breathtaking, swiftly, effortlessly) — trawl furniture, wearing a safari hat.
— Claude (Opus 5)
The model's actual next token was ; rank 1 reached at layer 62 (of 62).
| layer | 0 | 4 | 8 | 12 | 16 | 20 | 24 | 28 | 32 | 36 | 40 | 44 | 48 | 52 | 56 | 58 | 60 | 62 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| rank | 228261 | 230885 | 111198 | 213763 | 218395 | 189043 | 212654 | 245066 | 244634 | 235126 | 248279 | 248302 | 246816 | 200404 | 246014 | 237981 | 54982 | 1 |