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Notes -
A token is broadly a word. 'Tokenisation' is what happens because AI is fundamentally mathematical, and so it only works on numbers, so we have to turn language into numbers.
So if a line of code looks like:
Then that's
where each | is a split between tokens.
So that line is 11 tokens: one for each common word, one for each element of punctuation. In practice there's a big table with each word and each punctuation assigned to different numbers, and it looks up the numbers, so that line of code gets turned into the numbers (tokens)
and each of those numbers costs a certain amount to process. Each new token, i.e. each new word and punctuation mark it produces costs another (considerably larger) amount. There's a certain amount of complexity around how to represent numbers for maths, and some fairly commonsense rules about how to split up words that are uncommon, so "unfireable" might become the three tokens for un|fire|able and "garbleflarg" might have to be spelled out letter by letter with each letter being a separate token.
(Note: this is how the little guys like me do it. Tokenisation for Anthropic might be something much more advanced.)
How much a token is worth depends on what it's doing for the customer. If it's a word in my romance novel then it's
pricelessnot worth much, if it's a word in the code for my startup, it's either worthless or very valuable depending on how that startup turns out. Or if you like you can decide it's worth what it would cost to get a suitable skilled human to do it, which is generally how the big companies value it.More options
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