Emergent capability
A capability that appears abruptly above a scale threshold rather than gradually.
What it commits you to
Emergent capability describes performance that stays near chance below a threshold and then rises sharply above it, as observed in arithmetic and multi-step reasoning tasks. Whether the emergence is real or an artefact of discontinuous metrics like exact-match scoring is disputed. If it is real, capability thresholds are not smooth, which is bad for anyone relying on them.
Which realms lean on this
The vocabulary of measurement, and therefore of the disagreements measurement cannot settle.
technical · 1 realm — The Longview Foundry.
Canon that discusses this
See also
Scaling law
technicalPredictable power-law relationships between model size, compute and loss.
Distribution shift
technicalThe gap between the data a system was trained on and the data it meets.
Kurtosis
alignmentThe heaviness of a distribution's tails relative to its variance.
Capability threshold
governanceA pre-specified level of capability that triggers an obligation or a prohibition.