Can LLMs save themselves from verbosity?

« Je n'ai fait celle-ci plus longue que parce que je n'ai pas eu le loisir de la faire plus courte. » — Blaise Pascal, Lettres provinciales, Lettre XVI (1656) "I have made this one longer only because I have not had the leisure to make it shorter." Pascal's joke is the whole problem: the short version is the expensive one. LLMs lean the other way, they pad. So the question is whether a model can rein in its own verbosity, and what the trimming costs when the deciding clause is buried: "…shall...