Emergent ability

An emergent ability is a skill a model lacks when small but suddenly shows once it crosses a certain size. Chain of thought is the classic example (Chapter 1): prompting a small model to reason step by step barely helps or even hurts, but past a scale threshold the same prompting produces a large jump. In Chapter 4, careful reasoning behaviors emerge in a different sense, appearing during reinforcement learning because they earn rewards, without anyone programming them in.

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