Absolutely. They are sort of a compression scheme so the tokens contain different numbers of characters based on how frequent that string is. So common words like “the” will typically be one token, or maybe even common phrases like “I am”. On the other hand rare punctuation such as “~” may be its own token. There will also be tokens for many common prefixes and suffixes such as “non” and “n’t”. The tokens of each model are different but they definitely vary in length.
That actually is really really interesting. Thanks for giving the tldr. Do token lengths vary that much?
Absolutely. They are sort of a compression scheme so the tokens contain different numbers of characters based on how frequent that string is. So common words like “the” will typically be one token, or maybe even common phrases like “I am”. On the other hand rare punctuation such as “~” may be its own token. There will also be tokens for many common prefixes and suffixes such as “non” and “n’t”. The tokens of each model are different but they definitely vary in length.