Comment on A Space Odyssey 2026
cyberpunk007@lemmy.ca 1 week ago
Man I feel stupid. I don’t get the purpose of tokens. It’s to track your AI usage to make sure you’re using it? Or it’s to somehow limit your queries fo ensure a team uses it equally? Or…?
wraekscadu@vargar.org 1 week ago
LLMs predict the next best “token”. So what’s a token? It can be a word, a simple punctuation mark, or sometimes even a phrase.
So basically, here’s what an LLM works like:
Basically, it feeds in tokens to itself to predict the next best token. Then, that entire chunk of tokens is fed back in to predict the next token.
As you can see, tokens kinda correlate well with energy consumption, hardware wear and tear and so on.
So, a low token request will consume less resources than a high token request. Hence, it makes sense to charge per token.
echodot@feddit.uk 6 days ago
The problem with tokens is that you need a very high amount of tokens in order to be able to actually do anything useful with an AI. See you all sat there with your 10,000 tokens thinking you’re rich and you have a 20 minute conversation with it and now you’re out of tokens.
AI tokens suffer from an inflation problem you have really big numbers but they don’t actually represent actually all that much capability.
Fortunately there the companies token so I really don’t care, but I’ve been miffed if I was the one paying for them.