Something weird is happening with LLMs and chess

Maybe I'm really stupid... but perhaps if we want really intelligent models we need to stop tokenizing at all? We're literally limiting what a model can see and how it percieves the world by limiting the structure of the information streams that come into the model from the very beginning.

I know working with raw bits or bytes is slower, but it should be relatively cheap and easy to at least falsify this hypothesis that many huge issues might be due to tokenization problems but... yeah.

Surprised I don't see more research into radicaly different tokenization.

This is probably unnecessary, but: I wish you wouldn't use the word "stupid" there. Even if you didn't mean anything by it personally, it might reinforce in an insecure reader the idea that, if one can't speak intelligently about some complex and abstruse subject that other people know about, there's something wrong with them, like they're "stupid" in some essential way. When in fact they would just be "ignorant" (of this particular subject). To be able to formulate those questions at all is clearly indicative of great intelligence.