How Does Tokens in AI Work?

Tokens in AI are like building blocks that help computers understand and create language.

Imagine you're playing with letter tiles, each tile is a token. Just like how you can make different words by putting together different letters, computers use these tokens to read and write sentences. Each token could be a word, part of a word, or even punctuation like a comma or period.

When a computer looks at a sentence, say, "The cat is on the mat", it breaks it down into pieces. It might split it into: "The," "cat," "is," "on," "the," and "mat." Each of these parts is a token.

Sometimes it splits words even more, like turning "playing" into "play" and "ing", but that’s just to help the computer understand better. The main idea is: tokens are like little pieces that fit together to make full sentences, just like puzzle pieces form a picture.

When AI talks or writes, it uses these tokens to build new sentences. It's like having a bag of letter tiles, you pick some out and arrange them in different ways to create something new!