Why Your Next LLM Might Not Have A Tokenizer

Google's Byte Latent Transformer (BLT) is a new AI model that processes language at the byte level, eliminating the need for tokenization. This approach allows the model to better understand subword structures and perform more efficiently on tasks involving typos, low-resource languages, and character-level manipulations. BLT matches the performance of token-based models while offering more flexible compute allocation and improved scalability.