The brand new tokenizer has 200,000 tokens in whole, and about 25% are in non-English languages, says Deedy Das, an AI investor at Menlo Ventures. He used language filters to depend the variety of tokens in several languages, and the highest languages, in addition to English, are Russian, Arabic, and Vietnamese.

“So the tokenizer’s fundamental affect, in my view, is you get the price down in these languages, not that the standard in these languages goes dramatically up,” Das says. When an LLM has higher and longer tokens in non-English languages, it might probably analyze the prompts sooner and cost customers much less for a similar reply. With the brand new tokenizer, “you’re virtually 4 occasions price discount,” he says.

Das, who additionally speaks Hindi and Bengali, took a have a look at the longest tokens in these languages. The tokens mirror discussions taking place in these languages, so that they embrace phrases like “Narendra” or “Pakistan,” however frequent English phrases like “Prime Minister,” “college,” and “worldwide” additionally come up regularly. In addition they don’t exhibit the problems surrounding the Chinese language tokens.

That seemingly displays the coaching information in these languages, Das says: “My working concept is the web sites in Hindi and Bengali are very rudimentary. It’s like [mostly] information articles. So I might anticipate this to be the case. There should not many spam bots and porn web sites making an attempt to occur in these languages. It’s largely going to be in English.”

Polluted information and an absence of cleansing

Nevertheless, issues are drastically completely different in Chinese language. Based on a number of researchers who’ve regarded into the brand new library of tokens used for GPT-4o, the longest tokens in Chinese language are virtually completely spam phrases utilized in pornography, playing, and scamming contexts. Even shorter tokens, like three-character-long Chinese language phrases, mirror these matters to a major diploma.

“The issue is evident: the corpus used to coach [the tokenizer] just isn’t clear. The English tokens appear positive, however the Chinese language ones should not,” says Cai from Princeton College. It isn’t uncommon for a language mannequin to crawl spam when gathering coaching information, however normally there might be vital effort taken to scrub up the information earlier than it’s used. “It’s doable that they didn’t do correct information clearing with regards to Chinese language,” he says.

The content material of those Chinese language tokens may counsel that they’ve been polluted by a selected phenomenon: web sites hijacking unrelated content material in Chinese language or different languages to spice up spam messages. 

These messages are sometimes commercials for pornography movies and playing web sites. They may very well be actual companies or merely scams. And the language is inserted into content material farm web sites or generally professional web sites to allow them to be listed by search engines like google, circumvent the spam filters, and are available up in random searches. For instance, Google listed one search outcome web page on a US Nationwide Institutes of Well being web site, which lists a porn website in Chinese language. The identical website title additionally appeared in not less than 5 Chinese language tokens in GPT-4o.