Emergent as I have known and used it before is when more complex behavior emerges from simple rules. My goto example for this was Game of Life, where from very

Emergent as I have known and used it before is when more complex behavior emerges from simple rules. My goto example for this was Game of Life, where from very simple rules, a very organically behaving (turing complete) system emerges. Now Game of Life is a deterministic system, meaning that the same rules and the same start-configurarion will play out in exactly the same way each time — but given the simplicity of the logic and the rules the resulting complexity is what I'd call emergent. So maybe this is more about the definition of what we'd call emergent and what not. As someone who has programmed markov chains where the stochastic interpolation really shines through, transformer-based LLMS definitly show some emergent behavior one wouldn't have immediately suspected just from the rules. Emergent does not mean "conscious" or "self-reflective" or anything like that. But the things a LLM can infer from its training data is already quite impressive.