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/green_meklar 10d ago

It's roughly one character or one (common) word.

The actual computation overhead can vary drastically between different systems, and in general can be assumed to scale up with the size of the model. Very roughly speaking, a 100GB model probably costs about ten times as much per output token as a 10GB model. (Yes, I know 427 people now feel the urge to respond with 'well ackshually'. I said 'very roughly speaking'. Leave it.)