AI Glossary
Emergent Behaviour
What is Emergent Behaviour?
Capabilities that appear in large AI models that were not explicitly trained for and were not present in smaller versions of the same model. Examples include multi-step reasoning, code generation, and language translation emerging as model scale increases. Emergence is one reason AI capabilities are difficult to predict before training completes.
Example in practice
When researchers discovered that GPT-3 could perform arithmetic it was never explicitly trained on, they were observing emergent behavior — a capability that appeared only at sufficient model scale.
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