protologue

Emergent Abilities

Also called emergence, emergent capabilities.

Emergent abilities are capabilities that appear in large language models above a certain scale but are near chance in smaller ones, such as multi-step arithmetic or benefiting from chain-of-thought prompting.

Description

The idea explained why some prompting techniques only work with large models. It is disputed. Later analysis argued that many apparent jumps are artifacts of all-or-nothing metrics such as exact match, and that smoother metrics show gradual improvement with scale. The practical lesson stands either way, which is that a technique that fails on a small model may work on a larger one, and the reverse.

Sources

  1. Wei et al. (2022). Emergent Abilities of Large Language Models.
  2. Schaeffer et al. (2023). Are Emergent Abilities of Large Language Models a Mirage?.

Cite this entry

Protologue. (2026). Emergent Abilities. In Protologue: A Taxonomy of Prompting and LLM Techniques (v1.4.0, PTL-0184). https://protologue.com/t/emergent-abilities/

BibTeX
@misc{protologue_emergent_abilities,
  title = {Emergent Abilities},
  author = {{Protologue}},
  year = {2026},
  howpublished = {Protologue: A Taxonomy of Prompting and LLM Techniques, v1.4.0},
  note = {Entry PTL-0184},
  url = {https://protologue.com/t/emergent-abilities/}
}

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