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Tokenization (BPE, SentencePiece)
Part of the AI Engineer Roadmap
In short
Splitting text into subword tokens using algorithms like Byte-Pair Encoding — the actual unit LLMs read and generate, which explains quirks like why 'strawberry' confuses token-counting models.
How to learn this
- 1Use a real tokenizer (e.g. `tiktoken`) to see how different text splits into tokens.
- 2Learn why subword tokenization handles rare/unseen words better than word-level tokenization.
- 3Understand how token count relates directly to context window limits and API cost.
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