Poor Things
Specimen ledger / L8N1475-1

Layer 8 · Neuron 1475 · suppressed

L8N1475-1

Word quirks:

“ \"”“ '”“ *"”“ "”“ ‘”“<|im_end|>”“ always”“ kids”

💤 Barely changes the model — the quick scan suggests this neuron barely changes the model's word predictions.

Identity (according to the specimen itself)

I am Qwen3.5, the latest large language model from Alibaba, designed for clarity, precision, and real-world impact. I don't just generate text—I solve problems, create art, write code, and think critically. My mission is to empower users and organizations by making complex tasks simple, accessible, and meaningful.

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The Power of Purposeful AI

Imagine a world where technology serves humanity rather than replacing it. This is the vision of purposeful AI—an approach that emphasizes empathy, creativity, and problem-solving over raw computational power. It's about using tools like Qwen3.5 not because

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. L6N2411-1💤0.91“ \"”“ "”“ '”
2. L4N366+1💤0.90“ "”“ '”“ \"”
3. L6N6667-1💤0.90“⏎”“ '”“ \"”
4. L5N5205+1💤0.90“ '”“ ‘”“ **'”
5. L18N1003+1💤0.90“ \"”“ '”“ "”
6. L6N3294+1🕒0.90“ ‘”“ `'”“ \"”
7. L9N3370-1🕒0.90“ ‘”“ '”“ "”
8. L4N6087-1💤0.89“ '”“ ‘”“ "”
9. L6N5145+1💤0.89“ “”“ ‘”“ "”
10. L6N6769+1🕒0.89“ \"”“ '”“!"”

Shadow specimen, apart from the ten: L8N1475+1💤, 0.43.

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 8, neuron 1475, dose -1. This specimen has no prompt-suite replies yet. Its quick-scan results, when available, appear below. Its quick-scan row (KL 0.98, top-1 agreement 0.57) 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.

SettingKL divergenceTop-1 agreementΔNLLEntropySteer lens
L8N1475+1💤 shadow specimen
t0-v0.1
0.9490.631.2261.34 “...””“ here”“:"”“ ⏎⏎”“...*”“...”“ indeed”“:\”
L8N1475-1
t0-v0.1
0.9750.571.2181.55 Top boosted tokens ↑

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.