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Today, we're talking large language models, what they are, how they do what they do, and what ghosts may lie within the machine.

I'm Sophie Bushwick, tech editor at Scientific American.

And I'm George Musser, contributing editor.

And you're listening to Tech Quickly, the AI-obsessed sister of Scientific Americans' Science Quickly podcast.

My thoughts about large language models, which are those artificial intelligence programs that analyze and generate text,

are mixed.

After all, chat GPT can perform incredible feats, like writing sonnets about physics in mere seconds.

But it also displays embarrassing incompetence.

It failed to solve multiple math brain teasers, even after lots of help

from the human quizzing it. So when you play around with these programs, you're often amazed and

frustrated in equal measure. But there's one thing that LLMs have that consistently impresses me,

and that's these emergent abilities.

George, can you talk to us a little bit about these emergent abilities?

So the word emergence has different meanings in this context. Sometimes these language models

develop some kind of new ability because they're so ginormous. But I'm using the word

emergent abilities here to

mean that they're doing something they weren't really trained to do. They're going beyond their

...