What Stays Intact When the Model Changes? Paper 2 on Externalized Intelligence

I have published the second paper in the Artificial Deterministic Intelligence research series: Externalized Intelligence and Model Substitution.

The question is deliberately narrower than “are smaller models as intelligent as larger models?” They are not assumed to be. The question is whether a bounded operational contract can remain intact when authoritative task state is maintained outside model weights and the inference model changes.

In synthetic first-party studies, a frozen governed package was tested across 8B to 35B, 35B to 8B, and same-model restart controls. All 120 confirmatory handoff trials retained the measured policy contract and task correctness. The study also compares governed scoped context, authorized metadata-filtered lexical retrieval, and an oracle authorized-context ceiling. Each completed 90 of 90 trials under the shared frozen contract; conventional lexical retrieval had the lower measured retrieval-component time.

Those findings do not establish general model equivalence, production readiness, universal continuity, a universal safety guarantee, or retrieval superiority. The companion retains non-acceptances, timeouts, an incomplete scoped study, and a non-confirming cross-environment replication attempt.

Read the Version 2 preprint and evidence companion: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.23523687

The public-safe supplementary evidence package provides aggregate outcomes, claim boundaries, hashes, and a verifier without disclosing Cortex, HOPE OS, raw prompts, worker packages, or private implementation.

I welcome technical criticism, alternative experimental designs, and independent work that can challenge these bounded findings.