The basicsAI glossary
Emergent capabilities
Abilities that no one programmed and that emerge when a model becomes large enough: translating, reasoning, coding. That's what explains why a system trained to predict the next word ends up seeming to think.
In other words
A child who learns words one by one and then, one day, without warning, starts forming whole sentences.
Alyriaz articles that mention it
- Scaling laws: why "bigger" worked, and why it's slowing down
Scaling laws describe a predictable relationship between size, data, compute and performance. We explain what they actually say and why the industry is now looking for other levers.
- What is a "foundation model"? The building block on which everything else is built
The term "foundation model" refers to a general-purpose model trained at very large scale, then adapted to many tasks. We explain this concept and why it underpins the entire sector's economy.
- What is an "LLM"? The engine behind ChatGPT, Claude and Gemini, explained simply
LLM, large language model: the term is at the heart of all AI news, yet rarely explained. We break down simply how this technology that predicts the next word works, why this seemingly mundane ability is enough to produce text, code, and reasoning, and where its limits lie.