The article discusses the limitations of tokenization in large language models (LLMs) and argues for a shift towards more general methods that leverage compute and data, in line with The Bitter Lesson principle. It explores potential alternatives, such as Byte Latent Transformers, and examines the implications of moving beyond traditional tokenization approaches, emphasizing the need for improved modeling of natural language.

StochasTok is a novel stochastic tokenization method that enhances large language models' (LLMs) understanding of subword structures by randomly splitting tokens during training. This approach significantly improves performance on various subword-level tasks, such as character counting and substring identification, without the high computational costs associated with previous methods. Additionally, StochasTok can be easily integrated into existing pretrained models, yielding considerable improvements with minimal changes.