A bunch of people responded to this (in my uncharitable interpretation) by denying that emergent abilities were ever about predictability, and it was always merely about non-linearity. They responded to this paper by saying that the result was trivial, because you can always reparametrize some metric to make it look linear, but what we really care about is whether the ability is non-linear in the regime we care about.

I was one of those people. Can you point to where they predict anything, as opposed to retrodict it?