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 you're listening to Tech

quickly, the AI-obsessed sister of Scientific American's Science-Quickly podcast.

My thoughts about large language models, which are those artificial intelligence programs

that analyze and generate text, are mixed.

After all, ChatGPT 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 explicit instructions that they've been given.

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