Emergent Capability

In terms of biological intelligence or artificial intelligence, individual bees or individual ants have no intelligence in terms of their material basis and spiritual structure. However, when a group of bees or a group of ants gather together, they can produce intelligent behaviors such as constructing sophisticated beehives and cooperating to transport large objects.

In contrast, individual humans already possess intelligence, and when humans gather together, they should be able to generate behaviors of an intelligent order of magnitude. Such behaviors can be constructive, such as engineering, or destructive, such as warfare.

Similarly in AI world, emergent capability refers to a phenomenon in large-scale models where certain abilities experience a sudden breakthrough when the scale of the model (including computational resources, model parameters, or dataset size) reaches a certain threshold, resulting in a visibly dramatic improvement in performance. This enhancement is not simply a linear increase, but rather a qualitative leap. For instance, large-scale models may suddenly acquire abilities such as multi-step arithmetic, semantic disambiguation, logical deduction, conceptual synthesis, contextual understanding, etc., which are difficult for traditional small-scale models to achieve.

The process of quantitative change leading to qualitative change is the key to generating intelligence, the fundamental law of the universe.