Comment by energy123

Text is bytes that's accompanied with a major constraint on which sequences of bytes are permitted (a useful compression into principal axes that emerged over thousands of years of language evolution), along with a natural connection to human semantics that is due to universal adoption of the standard (allowing correlations to be modelled).

Text is like a complexity funnel (analogous to a tokenizer) that everyone shares. Its utility is derived from its compression and its standardization.

If everyone used binary data with their own custom interpretation schema, it might work better for that narrow vertical, but it would not have the same utility for LLMs.