Agents

Emergent Behavior

1 min read

What It Means

Capabilities or behaviors that appear in AI systems at scale without being explicitly programmed.

Emergence is both exciting (new capabilities) and concerning (unexpected behaviors) in AI systems.

Examples

  • Chain-of-thought reasoning
  • In-context learning
  • Code generation
  • Multi-step planning

Implications

  • Hard to predict capabilities
  • May include undesired behaviors
  • Requires empirical discovery
  • Complicates safety analysis
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