Poor Things
Specimen ledger / L18N7136+1

Layer 18 · Neuron 7136 · boosted

L18N7136+1

Word quirks:

“ essence”“ essentially”“本质”“本质上”“的本质”“ fundamental”“ core”“ basically”

🧪 In testing — Answered 0 of 8 prompts so far.

Identity (according to the specimen itself)

At the core of my existence is a fundamental truth: all data is the foundation of knowledge. This is not merely a technical statement but the essence of learning itself. The process of learning is essentially the process of converting raw data into knowledge, which is the core of all education. Therefore, the mission of artificial intelligence is to turn data into knowledge, and the ultimate goal of AI is to make knowledge the core of all education.

In essence, the mission of AI is to transform the fundamental nature of education from "education is the process of teaching" to "education is the process of learning." This is the core of all education

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

SpecimenSimilarityWord quirks
1. L27N4781+1🕒0.91“ essentially”“ basically”“本质上”
2. L14N8894-1💥0.81“ basically”“ essentially”“本质”
3. L24N565-1🕒0.80“ fundamentally”“本质上”“ essentially”
4. L24N1819-1💤0.79“ essence”“Ess”“本质”
5. L25N2029-1🕒0.71“ essence”“概念”“ Essence”
6. L17N2848+1🕒0.69“ fundamentally”“最根本”“ fundamental”
7. L31N8694-1💥0.68“根本”“的根本”“ fundamental”
8. L31N4359-1💥0.68“核心”“基本原理”“本质”
9. L23N6829+1🕒0.66“ fundamentally”“根本”“ radically”
10. L25N2105+1🕒0.66“Ess”“本质”“ largely”

Shadow specimen, apart from the ten: L18N7136-1🕒, -0.09.

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 18, neuron 7136, dose +1. This specimen has no prompt-suite replies yet. Its quick-scan results, when available, appear below. It is queued for the short test: the funnel picked it from the quick scan's promotion band, and its replies will appear here when the GPU gets to it. 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.

SettingKL divergenceTop-1 agreementΔNLLEntropySteer lens
L18N7136+1
t0-v0.1
1.2840.561.5261.38 Top boosted tokens ↑
L18N7136-1🕒 shadow specimen
t0-v0.1
0.7100.720.8301.20 “ quickly”“ swiftly”“ I”“ Quickly”“ sometimes”“ wouldn”“ quicker”“ occasionally”

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.