# Emergent abilities

> Skills that seem to appear suddenly in larger AI models and were not present in smaller ones.

Source: https://www.superintelligence.com.au/glossary/emergent-abilities/

Emergent abilities are skills that a large AI model shows but smaller versions of the same model do not. The idea is that as models grow, some abilities do not improve gradually. They seem to switch on at a certain size, such as solving a certain kind of puzzle or following a multi-step instruction.

This matters for safety and planning. If abilities can appear without warning, it is harder to predict what the next, larger model will be able to do, and a system might gain a worrying skill before anyone tests for it.

The idea is contested. Some researchers argue that many apparent jumps come from how the tests are scored: a test that only gives credit for a perfect answer can make steady improvement look like a sudden leap. Under a smoother scoring method, the same progress often looks gradual. Others maintain that some genuine abrupt changes do occur. Both sides agree that predicting what a new model can do, before it is built, remains difficult. The term spread through a 2022 paper, "Emergent Abilities of Large Language Models". The best-known critique followed in 2023, in a paper that asked whether those abilities were "a mirage".

Related: https://www.superintelligence.com.au/glossary/scaling-laws.md, https://www.superintelligence.com.au/glossary/frontier-model.md, https://www.superintelligence.com.au/glossary/evaluation.md, https://www.superintelligence.com.au/glossary/parameters.md