I think this is an interesting direction, but I think that step 2 of this would be to formulate some conjectures about the geometry of other LLMs, or testable hypotheses about how information flows wrt character counting. Even checking some intermediate training weights of Haiku would be interesting, so they’d still be working off of the same architecture.

The biology metaphor they make is interesting, because I think a biologist would be the first to tell you that you need more than one datapoint.

That makes sense; however it does not seem like they check the LLM outputs against the known solution. Maybe I missed that in the article.

it's not strictly a counting task, the LLM sees same-sized-tokens, but a token corresponds to a variable number of characters (which is not directly fed into the model)

like the difference between Unicode code-points and UTF-8 bytes, you can't just count UTF-8 bytes to know how many code-points you have

"not designed by humans"? Since when? Unless you count cortical organoids /wetware (grown in some instrumented petri dish) every artificial neural network, doesn't matter how complicated, it is designed by humans. With equations and rules designed by humans. Backpropagation, optimization algorithms, genetic selections etc... all designed by humans.

There is no biology here, and there are so many other words that describe perfectly what they are doing here, without twisting the meaning of another word.

Sure, but it makes no sense at all if you define biology as “the smell of a freshly opened can of tennis balls.” The original comment is probably better understood using a standard definition of the words it used, rather than either of our definitions.