[throwaway2037]

    > LLMs are, in some stretched meaning of the word, illiterate.

You raise an interesting point here. How would LLMs need to change for you to call them literate? As a thought experiment, I can take a photograph of a newspaper article, then ask a LLM to summarise it for me. (Here, I assume that LLMs can do OCR.) Does that count?

[danielmarkbruce]

It's a bit of a stretch to call them illiterate, but if you squint, it's right.

The change is easy - get rid of tokenization and feed in characters or bytes.

The problem is, that causes all kinds of other problems with respect to required model size, required training, and so on. It's a researchy thing, I doubt we end up there any time soon.