When Do LLMs Suddenly Get Good at Things?

My Weird Prompts · Sep 22, 2026 · 23m

In 2022, researchers defined an ability as "emergent" if smaller models lack it and larger models have it — meaning you couldn't have predicted it from the smaller models you already had. Since then, a fierce debate has unfolded over whether these jumps are a real property of the models or an artifact of the metrics we choose. This episode works through the strongest arguments on both sides, from the "mirage" paper that manufactured emergence on demand in vision tasks to the loss-perspective rebuttal that says the jump is real but indexed to pre-training loss rather than parameter count. It…