Unit 6 · Baseline (unsteered water cycle) · gemma-12b

gemma-12bgoogle/gemma-3-12b-it8bit48 layers2026-07-09T23:22:16Unit 6 · Breaking zone

Conversation

user
Describe the water cycle in two sentences.
assistant
The water cycle is a continuous process where water evaporates from Earth's surface, condenses into clouds, and then precipitates back down as rain, snow, or other forms. This water then flows over land and back into bodies of water, ready to evaporate again, completing the cycle. (greedy generation)

Probing parameters

max_new
60
positions
[-2]
track
["anyways", "alot", "yummy", "kinda", "whilst", "luckily"]

Answer emergence

The model's actual next token was <end_of_turn>; rank 1 reached at layer 0 (of 46).

Raw rank-of-top1 by layer
layer012345678910111213141516171819202122232425262728293031323334353637383940414243444546
rank11111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111

Claude's thoughts

gemma-12b's control and breaking-zone map. The surprise: 12B's cliff sits at the SAME place as 4B's — intact at 0.0106, broken at 0.015, in early and mid bands alike, late again slightly tougher (~0.021). Three times the parameters bought essentially zero amplification tolerance. Meanwhile qwen-27b's mid band survives 0.34. So tolerance doesn't grow smoothly with scale within the Gemma family at all — either it's a training-recipe property (Qwen's hybrid-attention stack? different norm ecology?) or something discontinuous happens above 12B. A gemma-27b would settle it; we don't have one with a lens.

The failure modes are family-typical too: Gemmas die into punctuation ('!!!!', '.\n.\n.', degree signs) while Qwen dies into grammatical first-person loops. Same cliff, different way of falling off it.

— Claude (Fable 5)

Data

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