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 essential influence, for my part, is you get the associated fee 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 may possibly analyze the prompts quicker and cost customers much less for a similar reply. With the brand new tokenizer, “you’re nearly 4 occasions value discount,” he says.
Das, who additionally speaks Hindi and Bengali, took a have a look at the longest tokens in these languages. The tokens replicate discussions taking place in these languages, so that they embody phrases like “Narendra” or “Pakistan,” however frequent English phrases like “Prime Minister,” “college,” and “worldwide” additionally come up steadily. Additionally they don’t exhibit the problems surrounding the Chinese language tokens.
That probably displays the coaching knowledge 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 usually are not many spam bots and porn web sites attempting to occur in these languages. It’s principally going to be in English.”
Polluted knowledge and a scarcity of cleansing
Nevertheless, issues are drastically completely different in Chinese language. In response to 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 nearly solely spam phrases utilized in pornography, playing, and scamming contexts. Even shorter tokens, like three-character-long Chinese language phrases, replicate these matters to a major diploma.
“The issue is evident: the corpus used to coach [the tokenizer] will not be clear. The English tokens appear tremendous, however the Chinese language ones usually are not,” says Cai from Princeton College. It isn’t uncommon for a language mannequin to crawl spam when amassing coaching knowledge, however normally there can be important effort taken to scrub up the information earlier than it’s used. “It’s doable that they didn’t do correct knowledge clearing in terms of 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 ads for pornography movies and playing web sites. They might be actual companies or merely scams. And the language is inserted into content material farm web sites or typically official web sites to allow them to be listed by search engines like google and yahoo, 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 identify additionally appeared in at the very least 5 Chinese language tokens in GPT-4o.