[chychiu]

While the article is not particular in depth, it is mostly accurate and provides a mostly well intentioned introduction to the concept and how that could relate to emergent property of LLMs. I am curious why you think it was "utterly banal".

Additionally, abiogenesis is well accepted in academia as a prime example of emergence.

[nathan_compton]

Abiogenesis is accepted, sure, but whether it constitutes an example of emergence isn't clear, at least by the definition I gave above, which is about supervenience. If you think that life is just chemistry which is just physics then life does not emerge from physics, it simply is physics and one needs only understand physics to understand life. If, on the other hand, you think that life has dynamical structures which are independent from and could not be predicted by someone who knew only the laws of physics, then it is a genuine case of emergence.

If you use "emergence" to mean "complicated stuff in a simple system" then I guess it is emergence, but that definition is philosophically useless or at the very least uncontroversial. It's trivially clear simple rules give rise to complex behaviors at this point. The question is the causal role of the roughly conserved elements of the complex system in question.