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Comment by skerit

6 days ago

Neat. Is it a single under-trained token in GPT-5.2? Or is something else going on?

Perhaps, the word does have it's own token, " geschniegelt"(geschniegelt with a space in front of it), is token 192786 in the tokenizer that GPT-5 apparently uses.

https://raw.githubusercontent.com/niieani/gpt-tokenizer/refs...

  • Isn't giving this word a token something deeply wasteful? When some more common things are multiple tokens.

    Indeed, how do they deal with Chinese? Are some ideograms multiple tokens?

    • It simply means the tokenizer's training corpus may have included a massive amount of German literature or accidentally oversampled a web page where that word was frequently repeated. Look up "glitch tokens" to learn more.

Based on their tokenizer tool[1], for GPT 5.x "geschniegelt" is tokenized into three tokens:

  (ges)(chn)(iegelt)

[1]: https://platform.openai.com/tokenizer

  • It's a single token in the most common usage, that is, with a space in front of it

    "This word is geschniegelt" is [2500, 2195, 382, 192786]

    Last token here is " geschniegelt"

    • Maybe this is why? Most of the training data has the single token version, so the three tokens version was undertrained?