• Linktank@lemmy.today
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    6 days ago

    Okay, can somebody who knows about this stuff please explain what the hell a “token per second” means?

    • IndeterminateName@beehaw.org
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      6 days ago

      A bit like a syllable when you are talking about text based responses. 20 tokens a second is faster than most people could read the output so that’s sufficient for a real time feeling “chat”.

      • SteevyT@beehaw.org
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        5 days ago

        Huh, yeah that actually is above my reading speed assuming 1 token = 1 word. Although, I found that anything above 100 words per minute, while slow to read, feels real time to me since that’s about the absolute top end of what most people type.

    • IrritableOcelot@beehaw.org
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      6 days ago

      Not somebody who knows a lot about this stuff, as I’m a bit of an AI Luddite, but I know just enough to answer this!

      “Tokens” are essentially just a unit of work – instead of interacting directly with the user’s input, the model first “tokenizes” the user’s input, simplifying it down into a unit which the actual ML model can process more efficiently. The model then spits out a token or series of tokens as a response, which are then expanded back into text or whatever the output of the model is.

      I think tokens are used because most models use them, and use them in a similar way, so they’re the lowest-level common unit of work where you can compare across devices and models.