This podcast episode explores the importance of tokenization in large language models. The speaker highlights that many issues faced by these models, such as difficulties in spelling tasks, processing non-English languages, and limitations in performing arithmetic, often stem from tokenization. The episode discusses the tokenization process, the challenges faced with different languages, and the use of Unicode and encoding. It also explores the role of the tokenizer as a translation layer and the implementation of the Byte Pair Encoding algorithm. The podcast concludes with discussions on tokenizer training, special tokens, and the impact of tokenization on language model performance.
