If you’ve ever played around with ChatGPT or any large language model, you might’ve heard the word “token” thrown around — usually when someone talks about limits or pricing. But what exactly are tokens?
Think of tokens as the smallest pieces of text an AI understands. They’re not always full words — sometimes just parts of them.
For example:
“ChatGPT is awesome!”
might be broken down into tokens like: Chat, G, PT, is, awesome!
The model doesn’t actually “see” sentences the way we do. It sees a long chain of these tokens and tries to predict what comes next — that’s how it builds responses.
Why does it matter? Because:
- Tokens decide how long your input or output can be (there’s always a token limit).
- Tokens also determine cost — AI tools charge based on how many tokens you use.
- And finally, they define context — the more tokens the model can process, the more it can “remember” in a conversation.
In short, tokens are like the currency of understanding in the AI world. Every question, answer, and word you type is made up of them.
Fun fact: the latest GPT models can handle over 128,000 tokens at once — roughly the length of a full novel. Imagine an AI reading an entire book and still remembering every detail — that’s the power of tokens.
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