The brand new tokenizer has 200,000 tokens in complete, 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, moreover English, are Russian, Arabic, and Vietnamese.
“So the tokenizer’s major affect, in my view, 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 could actually analyze the prompts quicker and cost customers much less for a similar reply. With the brand new tokenizer, “you’re nearly 4 instances 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, in order that they embody phrases like “Narendra” or “Pakistan,” however widespread 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 doubtless displays the coaching knowledge in these languages, Das says: “My working idea is the web sites in Hindi and Bengali are very rudimentary. It’s like [mostly] information articles. So I’d count on this to be the case. There aren’t many spam bots and porn web sites making an attempt to occur in these languages. It’s largely going to be in English.”
Polluted knowledge and an absence of cleansing
Nevertheless, issues are drastically completely different in Chinese language. In line with a number of researchers who’ve seemed 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, mirror 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 effective, however the Chinese language ones aren’t,” says Cai from Princeton College. It isn’t uncommon for a language mannequin to crawl spam when accumulating coaching knowledge, however normally there shall be vital effort taken to wash up the info earlier than it’s used. “It’s doable that they didn’t do correct knowledge clearing in the case of Chinese language,” he says.
The content material of those Chinese language tokens may counsel that they’ve been polluted by a particular 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 might 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 serps, circumvent the spam filters, and are available up in random searches. For instance, Google listed one search consequence web page on a US National Institutes of Health website, which lists a porn website in Chinese language. The identical website title additionally appeared in at the very least 5 Chinese language tokens in GPT-4o.
