What are tokens?

Tokens are small chunks of text generated by splitting the input text into smaller segments. These segments can either be words or groups of characters, varying in length from a single character to an entire word. For instance, the word hamburger would be divided into tokens such as ham, bur, and ger while a short and common word like pear would be considered a single token. LLMs like GPT-3.5 or GPT-4 break words into tokens for processing.