Printing every LLM input-output mapping would need 10^399,961 more atoms than the universe has
joshalbrecht · x · 2026-10-03
A fun back-of-the-envelope calculation: with a 10,000-token vocab, 100K context window and 10^16 seeds, a book containing every input-output mapping of an LLM would weigh about 10^399,961 more atoms than the observable universe. Notably, nearly all of that comes from input-side pages, since outputs are heavily constrained — suggesting everything interesting about an LLM stems from our own inputs and interpretations.
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