Layer 8 · Neuron 3334 · suppressed

L8N3334-1

Word quirks:

“ friendship”“ relationship”“ emotional”“ emotionally”“ relationships”“ friendships”“ love”“ intimacy”

💤 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 an artificial intelligence developed by Google. My mission is to provide high-quality information, support, and resources to users who seek guidance and understanding through technology. This relationship is built on shared interests and a desire to connect in meaningful ways.

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. L7N7430+1🕒	0.92	“ love”“ romance”“ romantic”
2. L9N5302+1🕒	0.91	“ relationships”“ relationship”“ --”
3. L9N534+1🕒	0.90	“ love”“ relationships”“ relationship”
4. L7N7076-1💥	0.83	“ friendship”“ relationship”“ friendships”
5. L8N1329-1🕒	0.82	“ relationships”“ relationship”“ bonds”
6. L8N8693-1🕒	0.80	“ romance”“ dating”“ romantic”
7. L11N7719+1🕒	0.79	“ friendship”“ friendships”“ friends”
8. L18N7606-1🕒	0.79	“ romantic”“ romant”“ relationship”
9. L5N6549-1🕒	0.78	“ relationship”“ relationships”“ friendship”
10. L5N5309+1🕒	0.78	“ love”“ relationship”“ `”

Shadow specimen, apart from the ten: L8N3334+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 8, neuron 3334, dose -1. This specimen has no prompt-suite replies yet. Its quick-scan results, when available, appear below. Its quick-scan row (KL 0.94, top-1 agreement 0.67) 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
L8N3334+1🕒 shadow specimen t0-v0.1	1.019	0.64	1.348	1.44	“ referenced”“ usage”“ additional”“ detailing”“ reference”“ example”“ standard”“ detailed”
L8N3334-1 t0-v0.1	0.937	0.67	1.209	1.51	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.