Meta BLT: Tokenizer-free, Byte-level LLM
Meta AI introduces the Byte Latent Transformer (BLT), a tokenizer-free architecture that dynamically forms byte patches for efficient compute allocation, outperforming Llama 3 on benchmarks including the CUTE benchmark. The model was trained on approximately 1 trillion tokens and features a three-block transformer design with local and global components. This approach challenges traditional tokenization and may enable new multimodal capabilities such as direct file interaction without retrieval-augmented generation. Additionally, Microsoft announced the Phi-4 14B parameter model achieving state-of-the-art results on STEM and reasoning benchmarks, surpassing GPT-4o. DeepSeek AI launched new vision-language models based on their MoE architecture with sizes ranging from 1.0B to 27B parameters. OpenAI released a new Projects feature for ChatGPT, and Cohere introduced their smallest and fastest Command R7B model. Anthropic published research on "Best-of-N Jailbreaking" vulnerabilities across text, vision, and audio models. Industry discussion highlights a trend of decreasing frontier LLM sizes, with GPT-4 at approximately 1.8 trillion parameters compared to newer models.