Emergent Behavior in Large Language Models refers to the ability of the model to perform tasks that it was not explicitly trained to perform.
Although models like GPT-3 are trained simply to predict the next word in a sequence, they develop capabilities such as translation, summarization, question answering, and code generation as a side effect of learning to model language at scale.
Examples
- Translation: Translating languages without explicit translation training data pairs.
- Arithmetic: Performing 3-digit arithmetic.
- Reasoning: Unscrambling words. The mechanism behind why this behavior emerges from next-word prediction remains an area of active research as of 2025.
