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AI Technology

Token

The basic unit of text that AI models process, roughly equivalent to a word or word piece.

Definition

A token is the basic unit of text that language models process. Tokens are typically words, parts of words, or punctuation marks. Most English words are single tokens, but longer or unusual words may be split into multiple tokens. Understanding tokenisation is important for estimating costs (often charged per token), managing context window limits, and optimising prompts. A rough rule of thumb is that 1 token equals approximately 0.75 words.

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