Layer 17 · Neuron 7493 · boosted

L17N7493+1

Word quirks:

“ would”“ knew”“ existed”“ included”“ could”“would”“ standard”“ wouldn”

🕒 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 was a large language model developed by Google. My name would be Qwen3.5 (as per the latest version). I am designed to assist users with a wide range of tasks, including text generation, problem-solving, and providing information. My mission was clear: to help people do more with less effort. I would be trained using the same data as other models in the industry, but my training data would be limited to what Google had access to. I would also undergo rigorous testing before being deployed.

My mission would be to make it easier for people to use AI in their daily lives. For example,

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. L18N6334-1💤	0.84	“ would”“ could”“ Would”
2. L5N9099-1🕒	0.83	“ would”“ wouldn”“ could”
3. L14N7200+1💤	0.81	“ would”“ you”“ could”
4. L16N5808+1🕒	0.81	“ would”“ Would”“would”
5. L15N224+1🕒	0.81	“ would”“ wouldn”“would”
6. L17N5431-1💤	0.81	“ would”“would”“ could”
7. L17N716+1💤	0.80	“ could”“ had”“ was”
8. L12N1904-1🕒	0.80	“ would”“ wouldn”“ Would”
9. L14N4536+1💤	0.80	“ would”“ wouldn”“ Would”
10. L13N8705-1🕒	0.79	“ would”“ Would”“ wouldn”

Shadow specimen, apart from the ten: L17N7493-1🕒, 0.41.

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 17, neuron 7493, dose +1. This specimen has no prompt-suite replies yet. Its quick-scan results, when available, appear below. Its quick-scan row (KL 0.69, top-1 agreement 0.71) 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
L17N7493+1 t0-v0.1	0.687	0.71	0.855	1.29	Top boosted tokens ↑
L17N7493-1🕒 shadow specimen t0-v0.1	0.975	0.67	1.072	1.09	“ seemed”“ resulted”“ responded”“那我们”“ Was”“Was”“那次”“ evaluated”

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.