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Machine Brief|

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  3. /Emergent Abilities
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Emergent Abilities

Capabilities that appear suddenly as language models reach certain sizes.

Definition

Capabilities that appear suddenly as language models reach certain sizes. A model might go from zero to strong performance on a task just by adding more parameters. Examples include arithmetic, code generation, and multi-step reasoning. Whether these are truly emergent or just hard to measure at small scales is debated.

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Related Terms

Scaling Laws

Mathematical relationships showing how AI model performance improves predictably with more data, compute, and parameters.

Emergent Behavior

Capabilities that appear in AI models at scale without being explicitly trained for.

Large Language Model

An AI model with billions of parameters trained on massive text datasets.

Activation Function

A mathematical function applied to a neuron's output that introduces non-linearity into the network.

Adam Optimizer

An optimization algorithm that combines the best parts of two other methods — AdaGrad and RMSProp.

AGI

Artificial General Intelligence.

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