Definition
Plain language
A compressed, meaning-level description of something, rather than its raw pixels or words.
As stated in the literature
A vector in a model's learned representation space encoding semantic content; Orca predicts the next frame's latent (against a frozen vision encoder's embeddings) instead of reconstructing pixels.
Also called: latents
Why it matters: Working at the meaning level lets a model focus on what matters and predict how things change without getting bogged down in exact pixels or words.
For example, instead of storing every pixel of a photo of a beach, a latent might just capture 'sunny beach with two people and a boat.'
Heard on the show
“Some fraction of these are bugs in the strict sense — undefined behavior, latent corruption — that may never be reachable in practice through actual user input.”Episode 014 — Why a Constrained Pipeline Beat a Full Coding Agent at Finding Bugs 30-to-1