But in reality, what we witness is the emergent patterns from each individual starling simply doing it darndest not to collide with the starlings nearby.

Biologists, physicists, ecologists and other scientists use the term “emergent” to describe self-organizing, collective behaviors that appear when a large collection of things acts as one. Combinations of lifeless atoms give rise to living cells; water molecules create waves; murmurations of starlings swoop through the sky in changing but identifiable patterns; cells make muscles move and hearts beat. Critically, emergent abilities show up in systems that involve lots of individual parts. But researchers have only recently been able to document these abilities in LLMs as those models have grown to enormous sizes.

An emergent behavior or emergent property can appear when a number of simple entities (agents) operate in an environment, forming more complex behaviors as a collective.

This creates what is essentially an evolution process for the program, causing it to depart from the original engineered design. As a consequence of this and a changing environment, assumptions made by the original designers may be invalidated, introducing bugs.