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 rely the variety of tokens in numerous languages, and the highest languages, apart from English, are Russian, Arabic, and Vietnamese.
“So the tokenizer’s principal influence, in my view, is you get the 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 well 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 take a look at the longest tokens in these languages. The tokens mirror 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 often. Additionally they don’t exhibit the problems surrounding the Chinese language tokens.
That doubtless 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 count on this to be the case. There should not many spam bots and porn web sites attempting to occur in these languages. It’s principally going to be in English.”
Polluted information and a scarcity of cleansing
Nonetheless, issues are drastically completely different in Chinese language. In accordance with 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 solely spam phrases utilized in pornography, playing, and scamming contexts. Even shorter tokens, like three-character-long Chinese language phrases, mirror these subjects to a big diploma.
“The issue is evident: the corpus used to coach [the tokenizer] shouldn’t be clear. The English tokens appear high-quality, however the Chinese language ones should not,” says Cai from Princeton College. It’s not uncommon for a language mannequin to crawl spam when gathering coaching information, however often there will probably be vital effort taken to wash up the info earlier than it’s used. “It’s attainable that they didn’t do correct information clearing in relation to Chinese language,” he says.
The content material of those Chinese language tokens might recommend 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 could possibly be actual companies or merely scams. And the language is inserted into content material farm web sites or generally legit 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 Nationwide Institutes of Well being web site, 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.
