Tokens are just readouts: why LLMs aren't fundamentally discrete systems

Sauers_ · x · 2026-11-11

Pushing back on the claim that LLMs are fundamentally discontinuous because they emit discrete tokens rather than a smooth continuous flow like humans, the author argues tokens are merely intermediate readouts from an underlying continuous process — tokens carry only 0.001% of the available past information, with the real computation living in the continuous internal state.

Related event: Sauers_ rebuts "LLMs are inherently discrete": tokens are readouts of a continuous process(5 posts)→

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