What is a token? Why AI charges by it, in 60 seconds
AI companies do not charge by the word. They charge by the token. A token is a small piece of text: a whole word, part of a word, or just a comma.
Rule of thumb for English: 1 token is about 4 characters, or three quarters of a word. 100 tokens is roughly 75 words.
You pay for input tokens (what you send) and output tokens (what the model writes back). A model's context window is measured in tokens too.
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