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 several languages, and the highest languages, apart from English, are Russian, Arabic, and Vietnamese.
“So the tokenizer’s most important impression, 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 will probably 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 mirror discussions occurring in these languages, so that they embrace phrases like “Narendra” or “Pakistan,” however widespread English phrases like “Prime Minister,” “college,” and “worldwide” additionally come up ceaselessly. Additionally they don’t exhibit the problems surrounding the Chinese language tokens.
That possible 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 anticipate this to be the case. There usually are 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 knowledge and an absence of cleansing
Nonetheless, issues are drastically totally 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, mirror these subjects to a major diploma.
“The issue is evident: the corpus used to coach [the tokenizer] isn’t clear. The English tokens appear wonderful, 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 gathering coaching knowledge, however often there can be important effort taken to scrub up the info earlier than it’s used. “It’s attainable that they didn’t do correct knowledge clearing with regards to Chinese language,” he says.
The content material of those Chinese language tokens might 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 could possibly be actual companies or merely scams. And the language is inserted into content material farm web sites or generally reputable web sites to allow them to be listed by engines like google, 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 web site in Chinese language. The identical web site title additionally appeared in a minimum of 5 Chinese language tokens in GPT-4o.
