Emergent Capability
A capability that appears in large language models above a certain size threshold, even though it was not explicitly trained for.
A capability that appears in large language models above a certain size threshold, even though it was not explicitly trained for. Chain-of-thought reasoning is an emergent capability — models below ~100B parameters show almost no benefit from CoT, while models above 100B show dramatic improvements. This suggests that reasoning was learned implicitly during pretraining but only becomes accessible at large scale.