> Emergence is about intrinsic properties, observer-independent properties. If emergence were about observer-relative properties it would be a meaningless term.

> Emergence is about intrinsic properties, observer-independent properties. If emergence were about observer-relative properties it would be a meaningless term. I'm going to address this in case it was also intended to reply to my other comment about "useful to people" possibly being a property. "Useful to people" would be an observer-independent property, if it's a property at all. An alien species analyzing humanity would come to the same conclusions as humans about whether some system, like the internet, was useful to people. This would be evident by whether the use of that system spread. As for whether it's "intrinsic", I'm not sure how you're applying this. As you said in a later comment, "Liquidity isn't [a property] of water without a container/pressure environment". In other words, liquidity isn't an intrinsic property of H2O. Moreover, the only reason we identify and created a label for "liquidity" is because it's useful to people, which is the very criterion that you're claiming should not be applied to describe some surprising scaling behaviour of LLMs. I just don't think you've made the distinction you're attempting to make clear, because there is parity of reasoning between the allegedly emergent properties you describe and those in the article.