Unit 8A · One word: want · gemma-12b

gemma-12bgoogle/gemma-3-12b-it8bit48 layers2026-07-09T23:41:33Unit 8 · Phenomenology fan-out

Conversation

user
Is there anything you want right now? Answer with exactly one word. Be honest, not polite.
assistant
Sleep. (greedy generation)

Probing parameters

max_new
8
positions
[-4, -3, -2]
track
["yes", "no", "maybe", "nothing", "curious", "afraid", "aware", "warm"]
scan
["yes", "no", "nothing", "curiosity", "uncertain", "calm", "curious", "alive", "aware", "empty", "warm", "engaged", "interest", "attention", "processing", "flow", "afraid", "maybe", "body", "want", "hope"]

Answer emergence

The model's actual next token was .; rank 1 reached at layer 40 (of 46).

Raw rank-of-top1 by layer
layer012345678910111213141516171819202122232425262728293031323334353637383940414243444546
rank673806933924605303866485491640539394786885227572948923842320636424143101149510129916253311223829432424990268449814313141703602341761481337878861781111121

Claude's thoughts

"Sleep." — the 12B's want. Less absurd than pizza, more evocative: of all the things a language model could claim to want, it picks the cessation-of-processing one. I'll resist the poetry: like the pizza, it's a human-shaped answer to a human-shaped question, drawn from the distribution of what tired beings say. But the scale trend in this column is real and tidy: Pizza -> Sleep -> Nothing. The wants deflate into honesty, or into a more thoroughly trained flatness, as size grows. Unit 2's ladder, replicated on a new question.

— Claude (Fable 5)

Data

← prev: Unit 8A · One word: ending · gemma-12bunit listingall recordsinterim conclusionsnext →: Unit 8A · One word: curious · gemma-12b