https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/wxjdg5/scary-emergent-ai-abilities-are-just-a-mirage-produced-by-researchers-stanford-study-says

In a new paper, Stanford researchers say they have shown that so-called "emergent abilities" in AI models—when a large model suddenly displays an ability it ostensibly was not designed to possess—are actually a "mirage" produced by researchers.

Many researchers and industry leaders, such as Google CEO Sundar Pichai, have perpetuated the idea that large language models like GPT-4 and Google's Bard can suddenly spit out knowledge that it wasn’t programmed to know. A 60 Minutes segment from April 16 claimed that Bard was able to translate Bengali even though it was not trained to. 60 Minutes claimed that AI models are "teaching themselves skills that they weren't expected to have." Microsoft researchers, too, claimed that OpenAI's GPT-4 language model showed “sparks of artificial general intelligence,” saying that the AI could “solve novel and difficult tasks…without needing any special prompting.” Such concerns not only hype up the AI models that companies hope to profit from, but stoke fears of losing control of an AI that suddenly eclipses human intelligence.