token

[ TOH-kuhn ]noun

The unit an AI reads and writes: roughly a short word, or a piece of a longer one.

Explanation

Everything is priced, capped and counted in tokens, which is why the working unit of these systems is not the sentence but the scrap.

Related words

• context window — How much the AI can hold in front of it at one time.
• prompt caching — Sending the unchanging chunk of your prompt over and over at a discount, instead of paying full price every time.