What Are Tokens in AI? Unraveling Their Role in Artificial Intelligence

Key Points

1. AI tokens are the building blocks of language for AI, breaking text into manageable pieces like words or subwords to enable efficient processing.

2. Tokenization is essential for natural language processing (NLP), allowing AI to perform tasks such as translation, summarization, and chatbot interactions.

3. AI models have token limits (e.g., GPT-3's 4,096 tokens) that affect performance and pricing, as providers often charge based on token consumption.

4. Different models use unique tokenization methods (e.g., BERT uses subword units), which can complicate integration and performance across languages or domains.

5. Real-world applications of AI tokens include IBM's AskHR chatbot, which automates HR tasks by processing employee queries efficiently.