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A critical examination of whether emergent abilities in large language models are genuine phase transitions or measurement artifacts caused by nonlinear evaluation metrics.
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Canon
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Whether or not emergent abilities are real, the claim that bigger models produce sudden, unpredictable new capabilities spread rapidly because it justified the massive investments in model scaling. The narrative served economic interests.
Highlights
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Emergent abilities may be artifacts of how we measure model performance, not genuine capabilities that suddenly appear at scale
The research shows that when you replace nonlinear evaluation metrics (exact-match accuracy) with linear metrics (token-level accuracy), many so-called emergent abilities appear as smooth, predictable improvements rather than sudden phase transitions.Was this useful?