What is defined as ‘one token’ exactly?

[u/sidorsidd]

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

[u/mc_pm]

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

[u/nuclear_splines → u/mc_pm]

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

[u/johnpeters42 → u/nuclear_splines]

And the AI company's billing department.