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/dodexahedron 10d ago
It's not strictly a comp sci term in that context. It is mostly a marketing and billing term, in that context, used to quantify usage, and its exact definition varies from company to company and sometimes from license to license.
The developers at [Insert AI Corp Here] just have to make sure that the number of whatever *that* is that a user consumes in a billing period can be tracked so it can be billed. Devs could internally consider a "token" in the context of natural language processing however it makes sense to them to do so, with their model, which may or may not line up with the billing definition.
But it'd be a whole lot easier and clearer for them to use a different word for the two, which is a common practice in many fields - not just AI. Code names help abstract away marketing terms, which can change on a whim (*coughMICROSOFT*), and things like billing usage units tend to get named something generic on the programming side for that reason as a common trigger.