> how would you break down natural language for a genetic algorithm?

The entire point is that you do not bother trying. From an information theory and computational perspective, raw UTF-8 bytes can work just as well as "tokens".

The program that is being evolved is expected to develop whatever strategy is best suited to providing the desired input/output transformation. Back to the bitter lesson on this one.

I’ll need to read up on genetic algorithms, I think.

That sounds really cool, but coming from training other statistical models, im having a hard time imagining what the training loop looks like.