AI glossary / How it works

Emergent behaviour

How it works, also called Emergent abilities

Abilities that show up in large models without anyone specifically training for them.

More words in How it works

• Fine-tuningTaking a ready-made AI model and giving it extra training on specific material so it gets good at one particular job.
• GANGenerative adversarial network. An older way of making fake images, where one network creates and another tries to catch it out, so both improve.
• GPTGenerative pre-trained transformer. The type of model behind ChatGPT: it generates text, was trained in advance on lots of writing, and uses the transformer design.
• Gradient descentThe method a model uses to improve during training: take a small step in whichever direction reduces its errors, and repeat millions of times.
• Ground truthThe known correct answer that an AI's output is checked against.