were

verb 13 senses

have the quality of being; (copula, used with an adjective or a predicate noun)

Qwen3 8B
DeepSeek V3
Mistral 7B

Panels 3, 4 and 5 are computed per model. Switch to see them disagree.

1 Your word measured

“John is rich”

verb 13 senses 12 synonyms 1 antonyms

Definitions come from WordNet, a hand-curated dictionary.

2 To an AI, it's pieces measured
DeepSeek V3 were 1 token
Mistral 7B were 1 token
Qwen3 8B were 1 token

This is the tokenizer splitting text, not the model understanding it.

3 Synonyms, antonyms, and the AI measured
Qwen3 8B
DeepSeek V3
Mistral 7B

Dictionary antonyms measured

Shade shows how close the model puts each word to were. 8 of 12 dictionary synonyms are in this build; the rest have no vector to compare yet.

Dictionary antonyms measured

differ is the dictionary opposite of were, yet this model puts it closer than 5 of the 8 synonyms it can score. Opposites share the sentences a word lives in, so cosine alone cannot tell them apart - which is why the dictionary seeds this list rather than the geometry.

Shade shows how close the model puts each word to were. 8 of 12 dictionary synonyms are in this build; the rest have no vector to compare yet.

Dictionary antonyms measured

differ is the dictionary opposite of were, yet this model puts it closer than 4 of the 8 synonyms it can score. Opposites share the sentences a word lives in, so cosine alone cannot tell them apart - which is why the dictionary seeds this list rather than the geometry.

Shade shows how close the model puts each word to were. 8 of 12 dictionary synonyms are in this build; the rest have no vector to compare yet.

Model neighbours are distributional, not dictionary synonyms. Two words can be close because they appear in similar sentences, which is why an antonym can outscore a synonym here.

4 Its personality measured
Qwen3 8B
DeepSeek V3
Mistral 7B
rare common
concrete abstract
casual formal
everyday technical
negative positive
mild intense
powerless powerful
small big
rare common
concrete abstract
casual formal
everyday technical
negative positive
mild intense
powerless powerful
small big
rare common
concrete abstract
casual formal
everyday technical
negative positive
mild intense
powerless powerful
small big

Scores are projections onto axes we defined from anchor words, not labels the model assigns.

5 Surprising neighbours measured
Qwen3 8B
DeepSeek V3
Mistral 7B

These sit just outside the closest neighbours in panel 3, and no dictionary lists any of them as related to were. That gap is the model’s own learned association.

These sit just outside the closest neighbours in panel 3, and no dictionary lists any of them as related to were. That gap is the model’s own learned association.

These sit just outside the closest neighbours in panel 3, and no dictionary lists any of them as related to were. That gap is the model’s own learned association.

These are statistical associations in the training data, not the model thinking.