“The mirage of emergent abilities only exists because of the programmers’ choice of metric”
Stanford researchers checked 29 metrics for scoring language models. Twenty-five showed smooth, steady gains with size and no sudden leaps. The four that showed “emergence” were harsh pass/fail tests like exact string match, where off by one digit counts as wrong as off by a billion. More than 1,000 tech leaders signed a pause letter over a measurement artifact.