In recent discussions about AI interpretability, emergence is often treated as a sign that LLMs have developed understanding. This post challenges that assumption and proposes an alternate view: what looks like emergent understanding is better described as semantic drift, or directionally reinforced statistical behavior, not grounded cognition.

Executive Summary

The concept of "emergence" in large language models is often mischaracterized as evidence of understanding. Building on established critiques of emergence as explanation (see Yudkowsky's The Futility of Emergence^[1]), this post offers a technical reframing that challenges basic assumptions about language, understanding, and cognition in both human and artificial systems. What we observe in LLMs is better understood as directionally reinforced diffusion through semantic space rather than genuine understanding.

Defining "Emergence"

The critique of the use of the term emergence in this piece will specifically refer to how it is colloquially used in AI spaces where it assumes emergence is evidence of understanding in AI systems. While the term has legitimate uses in AI research, such as documenting capability discontinuities in scaling or unexpected behaviors, problems arise when these observations are interpreted as evidence that the system has developed understanding.

Understanding, as used in this piece, refers to the system's ability to:

Independently generate representations that ground concepts in causal relationships with the world
Autonomously apply knowledge across contexts without external guidance
AI currently can transfer knowledge across domains but this usually requires prompting or fine-tuning.
Maintain coherence through self-generated self-correction
Understanding systems can detect their own inconsistencies and actively resolve them without requiring external feedback or carefully crafted prompts.
Self-initiate inquiry and reflection
LLMs rely on initial external input. They may generate questions but they do not "wake up" and decide to explore a question or concept. They can simulate this within the bounds of a response but do not spontaneously direct attention and begin inquiry without external prompting.

This distinction is important because the appearance of independence is often an artifact of prompt design or evaluation methods. What may appear as autonomous reasoning is better understood as so...

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