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296 points todsacerdoti | 2 comments | | HN request time: 0s | source
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smeeth ◴[] No.44368465[source]
The main limitation of tokenization is actually logical operations, including arithmetic. IIRC most of the poor performance of LLMs for math problems can be attributed to some very strange things that happen when you do math with tokens.

I'd like to see a math/logic bench appear for tokenization schemes that captures this. BPB/perplexity is fine, but its not everything.

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cschmidt ◴[] No.44369438[source]
This paper has a good solution:

https://arxiv.org/abs/2402.14903

You right to left tokenize in groups of 3, so 1234567 becomes 1 234 567 rather than the default 123 456 7. And if you ensure all 1-3 digits groups are in the vocab, it does much better.

Both https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.13423 and https://arxiv.org/abs/2504.00178 (co-author) both independently noted that you can do this with just by modifying the pre-tokenization regex, without having to explicitly add commas.

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jvanderbot ◴[] No.44372335[source]
Ok great! This is precisely how I chunk numbers for comparison. And not to diminish a solid result or the usefulness of it or the baseline tech: its clear that it we keep having to create situation - specific inputs or processes, we're not at AGI with this baseline tech
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chmod775 ◴[] No.44373437[source]
> [..] we're not at AGI with this baseline tech

DAG architectures fundamentally cannot be AGI and you cannot even use them as a building block for a hypothetical AGI if they're immutable at runtime.

Any time I hear the goal being "AGI" in the context of these LLMs, I feel like listening to a bunch of 18th-century aristocrats trying to get to the moon by growing trees.

Try to create useful approximations using what you have or look for new approaches, but don't waste time on the impossible. There's no iterative improvements here that will get you to AGI.

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mgraczyk ◴[] No.44375069{4}[source]
This is meant to be some kind of Chinese room argument? Surely a 1e18 context window model running at 1e6 tokens per second could be AGI.
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1. rar00 ◴[] No.44376558{5}[source]
This argument works better for state space models. A transformer would still steps context one token at a time, not maintain an internal 1e18 state.
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2. mgraczyk ◴[] No.44379401[source]
That doesn't matter, are you familiar with any theoretical results in which the computation is somehow limited in ways that practically matter when the context length is very long? I am not