this post was submitted on 03 Jul 2026
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"Tokens" are just made up.
These "tokens" that are used to "measure" how much you use, they are not a real dimension that can be measured. Just an artificial counter that goes up when they decide that it should go up.
They can change the "size" of a "token" every day, and every second, and every microsecond....
Not entirely wrong, but tokens are not just "fake" in the way, for example, an in-game currency is. They're the fundamental "units" of data, both input and output, processed by the model. For most models, tokens are just a certain number of characters or words. So they're not completely untethered from the model. If we're both using Clankerbot v5.1: Sloppy Logic Edition™️, your tokens are defined in the same way mine are.
This is near the edge of my limited understanding, but AFAIK, yeah they can mess with token costs and billing schemes all they want. They could theoretically charge us 2 different costs per token, or do surge pricing or some shit.
if they wanted to change the actual size/definition of what a token is though, that would require a whole new model (or at least a major revision).
You aren't totally wrong. Such a unit exists and it is also called tokens, that can measure the capability of a model and the size of a running operation in a model.
But what they use for calculating your bill is something different today.
That doesn't make much sense. When Anthropic moved to Sonnet 5 they introduced a new tokenizer which increased token use up to 35%. If these would be unrelated kinds of tokens why would the usage go up when the process of tokenization changes?