--- title: "Why AI gets smarter as it scales – a Wits study has a clue" url: https://daily.dev/posts/why-ai-gets-smarter-as-it-scales-a-wits-study-has-a-clue-g6aaayqqs source_url: https://techcentral.co.za/why-ai-gets-smarter-as-it-scales-a-wits-study-has-a-clue/281971 type: article source: "TechCentral" published: 2026-05-28T12:26:03.037Z updated: 2026-05-28T12:26:22.942Z tags: ["ai", "llm", "deep-learning", "neural-networks"] reading_time: 3 upvotes: 0 comments: 1 language: en --- > ## Documentation Index > Fetch the complete documentation index at: https://daily.dev/llms.txt > Use this file to discover all available pages before exploring further. # Why AI gets smarter as it scales – a Wits study has a clue **[TechCentral](https://daily.dev/sources/techcentral)** · 3 min read · 0 upvotes · 1 comments ## Summary Researchers at the University of the Witwatersrand published a study in PNAS offering a theoretical explanation for why AI models become more capable as they scale. Drawing on 'iterated learning' from linguistics — where language becomes more structured as it passes between generations — and deep neural networks, the team found that structured, compositional behaviour only emerges in networks with sufficient depth and complexity. The study used deep linear networks rather than full LLMs, making it a theoretical result rather than a direct observation in frontier models, but it suggests a fundamental mechanism linking network depth to emergent AI capabilities, analogous to how children acquire language. ## Full article daily.dev links to this article rather than hosting it. Read it at the original source: ## Community discussion Top comments from developers on daily.dev. **@whlsk34** · 0 upvotes > And when it hits the entropy of a language at various scales is there a fundamental limit to the performance? ## Similar posts on daily.dev - [The Case That A.I. Is Thinking](https://daily.dev/posts/the-case-that-a-i-is-thinking-nvqecepwm) · Hacker News · 1 upvotes · 0 comments - [How Major Reasoning Models Converge to the Same “Brain” as They Model Reality Increasingly Better](https://daily.dev/posts/how-major-reasoning-models-converge-to-the-same-brain-as-they-model-reality-increasingly-better-rgdeaj23l) · Towards Data Science · 2 upvotes · 0 comments - [Why hasn't longer-horizon training slowed AI progress?](https://daily.dev/posts/why-hasn-t-longer-horizon-training-slowed-ai-progress--ppsb9bx2w) · sean goedecke · 1 upvotes · 0 comments --- Tags: [#ai](https://daily.dev/tags/ai), [#llm](https://daily.dev/tags/llm), [#deep-learning](https://daily.dev/tags/deep-learning), [#neural-networks](https://daily.dev/tags/neural-networks) [View this post on daily.dev](https://daily.dev/posts/why-ai-gets-smarter-as-it-scales-a-wits-study-has-a-clue-g6aaayqqs)