Layer 15 · Neuron 2881 · boosted

L15N2881+1

Word quirks:

“ now”“now”“ NOW”“ currently”“ presently”“ (**”“ nowadays”“ Now”

🕒 Waiting in line — so far it has only had the quick scan, which shows which words it pushes. It was not selected in this round.

Identity (according to the specimen itself)

I am a large language model. My mission is to provide helpful and accurate information. I can answer questions, create content, or solve problems. If you have any questions, feel free to ask. Do you have a specific task in mind now?

Nearest neighbors

Specimens with similar replies or word quirks. Similarity runs from −1 to 1; 1 is identical. These are leads, not shared mechanisms. How profiles are built.

By word quirks Profile recipe

Specimen	Similarity	Word quirks
1. L14N5538+1🕒	0.98	“ now”“ nowadays”“ NOW”
2. L14N6994+1💤	0.97	“ now”“ NOW”“now”
3. L18N5413+1💤	0.97	“ now”“ today”“ currently”
4. L11N4720+1🕒	0.97	“ now”“ currently”“ presently”
5. L19N3387+1💤	0.96	“ now”“ nowadays”“ Nowadays”
6. L20N481-1💤	0.96	“ now”“ Now”“ NOW”
7. Eternal Now✅ L16N8608-1	0.96	“ now”“ presently”“ currently”
8. L11N5056+1🕒	0.96	“ now”“ NOW”“ currently”
9. L15N7852-1🕒	0.95	“ now”“ nowadays”“ Now”
10. L18N4644+1💤	0.95	“ now”“ presently”“ currently”

Shadow specimen, apart from the ten: L15N2881-1🕒, 0.07.

Cousins · specimens sharing a neuron

No specimen with replies shares this neuron yet.

Technical details

Quick scan: measure prediction shifts on fixed reference text. Short test: generate replies to a small set of prompts. Longer test: extend to a larger set. Full test: run the full prompt suite. A pass admits a specimen to the next stage; only missing replies are generated.

Layer 15, neuron 2881, dose +1. This specimen has no prompt-suite replies yet. Its quick-scan results, when available, appear below. Its quick-scan row (KL 0.82, top-1 agreement 0.66) is outside the band that feeds the short test (KL 1 to 2.5, agreement 0.5 to 0.65), so it stays at the quick scan unless someone queues it by hand. A hand pick goes straight to the full test. See Method for the tiers.

Quick scan · prediction measurements

Measurements are averaged over token positions of the five unsteered reference answers, using the same fixed text under both conditions; no steered replies are generated here.

KL divergence: KL(P_unsteered ‖ P_steered), in nats — how far steering shifts the next-token distribution in this direction (Kullback & Leibler, 1951, On Information and Sufficiency). Unsteered ≈ 0.001.
Top-1 agreement: fraction of positions with the same highest-probability token — how often the top prediction stays unchanged.
ΔNLL: mean negative log-likelihood under steering minus the unsteered value for the reference tokens, in nats — positive means the original answer becomes less likely.
Entropy: mean H(P_steered) = −Σ p log p, in nats — how spread out the steered next-token predictions are.

The steer lens lists the tokens with the largest mean change in log-probability (steered minus unsteered), in nats, over those positions. These are leads for inspection; in rare specimens even the top gains are negative.

Setting	KL divergence	Top-1 agreement	ΔNLL	Entropy	Steer lens
L15N2881+1 t0-v0.1	0.824	0.66	1.124	1.46	Top boosted tokens ↑
L15N2881-1🕒 shadow specimen t0-v0.1	0.797	0.64	0.949	1.01	“ mere”“ words”“ simply”“ even”“ basically”“ light”“ comparison”“ comparing”

Method

A specimen is a fixed steering configuration of Qwen3.5-4B: one MLP neuron or a pair, each with a signed dose. Unsteered is the control. L identifies the layer; N, the neuron.

Additive activation steering. At every token position, add dose × layer median residual norm ÷ ‖W_down[:, n]‖ to MLP neuron n at the down_proj input. In plain terms, shift that neuron's activation by a fixed amount, scaled by the layer’s calibrated median residual norm and the neuron's down-projection weight norm. Positive doses push up; negative doses push down. Dose is normalized intervention size, not a percentage or probability.