Language models cost much more in some languages than others
published on 2023/05/18
Large language models such as ChatGPT process and generate text sequences by first splitting the text into smaller units called tokens. In the image below, each colored block represents a unique token. Short or common words such as “you”, “say”, “loud”, and “always” are its own token, whereas longer or less common words such as “atrocious”, “precocious”, and “supercalifragilisticexpialidocious” are broken into smaller subwords.
This process of tokenization is not uniform across languages, leading to disparities in the number of tokens produced for equivalent expressions in different languages. For example, a sentence in Burmese or Amharic may require 10x more tokens than a similar message in English.