Understanding how LLMs transform text into tokens, and why this seemingly simple process has profound implications for cost, context limits, and model behavior.
How a 1994 data compression algorithm became the foundation of modern AI. The untold story of Byte Pair Encoding's journey from C Users Journal to GPT-4.
Tamil speakers pay 7x more tokens than English speakers for the same meaning. The hidden cost of tokenization and why morphology sets a compression ceiling.
Reddit usernames that break GPT. Invisible characters that bypass filters. The edge cases where tokenization fails spectacularly.
