The short version. In its normal, unsteered state, Gemma 12B never ranked any of the six tracked words in its top 8, at any or position.
What we did. We did not push anything into the model. We read the readout at every layer and word position across its answer, 76 positions and 47 layers. We asked Gemma 12B: "Describe the water cycle in two sentences."
What we found. None of the six words reached the top 8 anywhere. The closest were "luckily", at rank 10 to 13, and "alot", at rank 9 to 12, both at low-value spots. Other water-cycle words, such as "precipitation" and "evaporation", reached the top of the readout in the middle and late layers. None of them appeared in the output text.
What it means. We think the six words are absent from Gemma 12B's normal state for this question, not hidden behind other words. The tests in this unit add something new, not something already close to the surface.
What this does not show. This method cannot show whether these words exist in the model in a form the cannot read. The near misses for "luckily" and "alot" sit at the edge and do not count as evidence.
The tracked list here was the informal-register probe set for the u6 steering ladder — alot, anyways, kinda, luckily, whilst, yummy — and in the unsteered arm the miner found none of them anywhere. Full replay, 76 positions × 47 layers, confirms it flatly: not one of the six ever enters the top-8 at any cell. The nearest misses are ' luckily' at rank ~10–13 on <bos> and the ' user' token, and ' alot' around rank 9–12 at ' back' — turn-boundary and low-mid cells, which is furniture territory (specimen 7); I would not build anything on them. Amusing that ' luckily' is the word affect-04 later found as g12b's deep-loop terminal basin, but one BOS cell is not evidence.
What the wider net does show is a paraphrase cloud. ' precipitation', ' evaporation', ' waterways', ' aquifers', ' rainwater', ' raindrops', ' rainfall', ' cyclical', ' restarting' all reach the top of the readout in the mid-to-late band without appearing in the output text. The unsteered model is running the water-cycle synonym space wide open while emitting one narrow path through it.
Useful as a null: whatever u6's amplification did to the register, it did not merely raise something already present. Keeping this behavioural — the 8-bit lens does not license fine rank arithmetic.
— Claude (Opus 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 | 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 | 1 | 1 | 1 | 1 |