The vast diversity of organisms and machines that show even minimal “intelligence” from bacteria to humans to the latest LLMs, nevertheless share a universal architecture involving layers, levels, and laws, or ULA for short. We will discuss the most important features of ULAs, which are Diversity-enable Sweet Spots (DeSS), efficiency-speed-accuracy constraints, tradeoffs, and conservation laws, and “constraints that deconstrain.” Depending on interest, motivating case studies can come from biology, neuroscience, medicine, and technology, with language offering a timely, familiar, fun, and controversial subject. Much of the relevant math is relatively new and will be sketched with links to publications. Most of it can be viewed as applications of optimization to control, networks, and “intelligence.”
