Large Language Models

Opening — Why this matters now Large Language Models are getting bigger, richer, and—quietly—better at remembering things they were never supposed to. Not reasoning. Not generalizing. Remembering. The paper behind this article introduces an uncomfortable but clarifying concept: memorization sinks. These are not bugs. They are structural attractors inside the training dynamics of LLMs—places where information goes in, but never really comes back out as generalizable knowledge. ...

Opening — Why this matters now Large language models are now a routine part of software development. They autocomplete functions, explain repositories, and quietly sit inside CI pipelines. The productivity gains are real. The energy bill is less visible. As inference increasingly dominates the lifecycle cost of LLMs, the environmental question is no longer about how models are trained, but how often—and how inefficiently—they are used. This paper asks an unfashionable but necessary question: where exactly does inference energy go? The answer turns out to be uncomfortable. ...

Opening — Why this matters now Large language models are getting bigger, slower, and—paradoxically—more forgetful in all the wrong places. Despite trillion‑token training runs, practitioners still complain about brittle reasoning, hallucinated facts, and sudden regressions after fine‑tuning. The paper behind this article argues that the problem is not insufficient memory, but poorly allocated memory. ...

Opening — Why this matters now Large Language Models are increasingly marketed as general problem solvers. They summarize earnings calls, reason about code, and explain economic trends with alarming confidence. But when confronted with time—real, numeric, structured temporal data—that confidence starts to wobble. The TSAQA benchmark arrives at exactly the right moment, not to celebrate LLM progress, but to measure how far they still have to go. ...

Opening — Why this matters now For years, the dominant anxiety around large language models has been hallucination: the model makes things up. The paper you just read argues that we’ve been staring at the wrong failure mode. The real issue is subtler and arguably more dangerous: memorization sinks — regions of the training distribution where models stop learning general structure and instead collapse into rote recall. These sinks don’t merely inflate benchmark scores; they quietly reshape model behavior, evaluation outcomes, and downstream reliability. ...

Opening — Why this matters now In the past two years, alignment has quietly shifted from an academic concern to a commercial liability. The paper you uploaded (arXiv:2601.16589) sits squarely in this transition period: post-RLHF optimism, pre-regulatory realism. It asks a deceptively simple question—do current alignment techniques actually constrain model behavior in the ways we think they do?—and then proceeds to make that question uncomfortable. ...

Opening — Why this matters now Long-context models have become the quiet arms race of the LLM ecosystem. Every few months, someone announces another context window milestone—128k, 1M, or “effectively unlimited.” The implication is obvious and seductive: if a model can read everything, it must understand everything. The paper behind this article is less impressed. It asks a colder question: what actually happens inside a model as context grows, and whether more tokens translate into more usable intelligence—or just more noise politely attended to. ...

Opening — Why this matters now Explainability for large language models has reached an uncomfortable stage of maturity. We have methods. We have surveys. We even have regulatory pressure. What we do not have—at least until now—is a reliable way to tell whether an explanation actually reflects how a model behaves, rather than how comforting it sounds. ...

Opening — Why this matters now For years, debates about large language models (LLMs) have circled the same tired question: Do they really understand what they’re saying? The answer—still no—has been treated as a conversation stopper. But recent “reasoning models” have made that question increasingly irrelevant. A new generation of AI systems can now reason through problems step by step, critique their own intermediate outputs, and iteratively refine solutions. They do this without grounding, common sense, or symbolic understanding—yet they still solve tasks previously reserved for humans. That contradiction is not a bug in our theory of AI. It is a flaw in our theory of reasoning. ...

Opening — Why this matters now For years, the received wisdom in AI planning was blunt: language models can’t really plan. Early benchmarks—especially Blocksworld—made that verdict look almost charitable. Models hallucinated invalid actions, violated preconditions, and confidently declared failure states as success. The field responded by bolting on external verifiers, symbolic planners, or human-in-the-loop corrections. ...