Definition
Plain language
A skill that seems to appear suddenly in AI models once they get big enough.
As stated in the literature
The observed phenomenon (and contested interpretation) that certain task abilities appear sharply at scale, sometimes argued to be metric-choice artifacts rather than underlying jumps in capability.
Also called: emergent capabilities
Why it matters: How you interpret these jumps shapes your sense of how predictable, and how dangerous, the next scale-up will be.
For example, models below a certain size score near zero on multi-step arithmetic, but above it suddenly jump to high accuracy — until people show that smoother metrics make the same jump look gradual.
Heard on the show
“What this is suggesting is that some of what we've been calling emergent capability is actually a workaround for under-utilized depth.”Episode 074 — How a Fifteen-Hundred-Dollar Training Run Matched Llama and Gemma on Reasoning