I'm sure that since ChatGPT went mainstream, you've been hearing the term LLM quite frequently. The article below provides a clear and insightful explanation of Large Language Models (LLMs) and the concepts of tokens and embeddings.
The article explores how LLMs process text by converting it into numerical representations. It first explains why text must be transformed into numbers for machine learning systems, emphasizing that tokens—the fundamental units derived from text—are mapped to unique numeric identifiers.
While words might seem like natural token candidates, the article highlights that tokens can also be sub-word units, offering greater flexibility in text representation. This approach helps address challenges such as case sensitivity and the emergence of new words, which can complicate text processing. By breaking text into smaller components, like characters or sub-words, LLMs can handle linguistic variations and nuances more effectively.
The article also delves into embeddings, which are vector representations of tokens that capture their meanings and relationships in a continuous vector space. These embeddings allow LLMs to understand context and semantics, enhancing their ability to perform tasks like language generation and comprehension.
Overall, the piece underscores the crucial role of tokenization and embeddings in improving LLMs' capabilities in natural language processing (NLP).
https://msync.org/notes/llm-understanding-tokens-embeddings/
