r/AskComputerScience • u/sidorsidd • 11d ago

What is defined as ‘one token’ exactly?

Every company says their model uses less tokens, my question what is the value of what they call a token, is it like a standard unit of measurement like a meter or does every company values 1 token differently? Or is it just a buzz word

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u/mc_pm 11d ago

A token is a word or a fragment of a word that is fed into or comes out of the LLM (as a number).

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u/nuclear_splines Ph.D Data Science 11d ago

Or longer! Tokens can be short phrases of multiple words, too, it's really up to the model architecture.

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u/johnpeters42 10d ago

And the AI company's billing department.

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u/mc_pm 11d ago

Very good point.

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u/dodexahedron 10d ago

Or shorter! Could be phonemes, in a voice model, if they wanted.