Do you remember when people discovered that LLMs had emergent coding ability? That turned out to be a pretty big deal...
...for who? people willing to commit code with a lot of hidden bugs? Or management in a hurry to lay people off? Don't underestimate how quickly people will run straight into a wall if you tell them it's a door.
Eloquently said.
I should have said 'big deal, for better or for worse.' Regardless of whether one thinks it's a good thing, this was a major discovery that turned out to affect a lot of things.
How is it not emerging, if the phenomena hasn’t been hard-wired in and is unexpected?
Unexpected I can handle. Emerging has overtones to AGI
It's like fusion. "Sustained plasma" and "more energy out than in" said time after time after time.
Emergent basically means ‘we didn’t design this capability but it’s there’, it’s always been a thing, not sure why you associate it with AGI so strongly.
Do you think its not emergent because you think this behavior was explicitly coded in or you dont think its emergent because you dont like the implications of thinking it?
Option 3: It's not emergent because the capabilities are vastly overstated.
Words like emergent, hallucinate, reason, think, infer.. they carry additional meaning. Their use as terms of art in some cases is because for the cognoscenti it helps understand intent by simile, but for the person in the street it is read to mean much more. There are of course lots of interesting emergent behaviours, the patterns in bistable chemical reactions which fascinated Turing, patterns from fractals, flocking models for particle animations from a few rules.