Token
A small chunk of text, often part of a word, which is the unit a model reads and writes.
Models don't read letters or whole words. They read tokens: chunks that are often a short word or a piece of a longer one. In English a token averages around three quarters of a word, so a page of text comes to a few hundred tokens.
Tokens explain several everyday quirks. Limits on how much a chat can hold, and on how much you can use in a day, are counted in tokens. And because the model sees chunks rather than letters, a question like "how many r's are in strawberry?" asks about something it doesn't directly see, which is why it can slip on spellings and letter counts.
For example
A long word like "unbelievable" may be split into a few tokens, so the model never sees it as 12 separate letters.
Put it to use
Where you'll meet token in ChatGPT, Gemini and Claude, how to use it there, and the mix-up most people make.
Daily Bytes Plus is in the Android app.