The short version, in case the title was being coy: at num_ctx=2048, Gemma 4 E2B produces three sequential outputs in a single response — a mostly-hallucinated meeting summary, a Note: saying that summary isn't actually in the transcript, then a more careful retry. Three runs at temperature=0.0, identical pattern every time. Other E-class models in this envelope don't do this. The rest of this post is the 15-run ablation that found it, and why my last Gemma 4 article framed it wrong.
A couple of weeks ago I published a post for the Gemma 4 Challenge with what felt at the time like a confident, well-defended claim: Gemma 4 E2B, faced with a silently-truncated transcript, "detected" the problem and pushed back. I called this calibration. I called it useful. I went to bed pleased with myself.
Then two engineers showed up in the comments and politely set me on fire.
Daniel Nwaneri pointed out that "mix of unrelated topics" is a content claim, not a length claim — so the model is doing more than I was giving it credit for, but also: a self-contained paragraph isn't a meeting transcript, and I should run a truncated paragraph from the same session as the cleaner control before declaring victory.
