Tokens Are the Work Units
Describe tokens as the units an LLM reads and writes, and explain why tokenization affects cost, context, and weird text behavior.
A model does not receive your document the way your eyes do. It receives a token stream. Tokens Are the Work Units In a SIPOC view, tokenization is the conversion between supplier text and model input. That conversion is usually invisible, so professionals misread the failure. They say, "It was only two pages," but the model saw thousands of fragments. They say, "It ignored the serial number," but the serial number may have been split into pieces with no semantic meaning. They say, "It cannot count letters," but letter counting is awkward when the model operates on token chunks. Tokens…
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