"A phrase I've often clung to regarding artificial intelligence is one that is also cloaked in a bit of techno-mystery. And I bet you've heard it as part of the lexicon of technology and imagination: "emergent abilities." It's common to hear that large language models (LLMs) have these curious "emergent" behaviors that are often coupled with linguistic partners like scaling and complexity. And yes, I'm guilty too."
"In AI research, this phrase first took off after a 2022 paper that described how abilities seem to appear suddenly as models scale and tasks that a small model fails at completely, a larger model suddenly handles with ease. One day a model can't solve math problems, the next day it can. It's an irresistible story as machines have their own little Archimedean "eureka!" moments. It's almost as if " intelligence" has suddenly switched on."
Apparent emergent abilities in LLMs often appear as sudden task performance gains as models scale, such as solving math problems that smaller models fail at. Early reports framed these gains as abrupt leaps in capability. Newer 2025 research suggests those shifts resemble phase changes in physics rather than the onset of cognition. Model components and parameters remain the same while internal organization and tactics change with scale. Larger models transition from relying on simple word-order heuristics to detecting more complex, distributed patterns of meaning. Those transitions reflect mathematical reorganization of representations, not the birth of minds or consciousness.
Read at Psychology Today
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