Are Emergent Abilities of LLMs a Mirage?
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First page

The curator’s take
Key pointsStanford's critical re-examination of emergent abilities.
01
Metric-choice argument: Argues "emergence" is often an artifact of using discontinuous metrics (like exact match) rather than smooth ones (like log-probability).
02
Metric substitution: When re-analyzing with continuous metrics, many "emergent" capabilities appear smoothly with scale.
03
Research methodology: Cautions the field against interpreting metric-choice artifacts as fundamental phase transitions.
04
Best Paper at NeurIPS 2023: Influential paper that sparked extensive debate about what "emergence" really means in LLMs.
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