Demystifying Tokens & Temperature: Stop Feeling Lost in the LLM Jungle

Sometime or in the beginning the world of LLMs feels like trying to order coffee in a foreign language – you know what you want, but the terminology makes your brain hurt.

Let's fix that with some real examples.

Tokens: The LEGO Blocks of AI Language

Tokens are how LLMs chop up text. Not words, not characters – something in between that makes perfect sense to robots.

Real Examples:

• "Hello world" = 2 tokens

• "I'm learning about AI" = 5 tokens

• "Understanding" = 2 tokens ("Under" + "standing")

• "Don't" = 2 tokens ("Don" + "'t")

Quick Math: ~4 tokens per word, so your 100-word email costs about 400 tokens.

# Using OpenAI's tiktoken library
import tiktoken

encoding = tiktoken.get_encoding("cl100k_base")
text = "Hello! How are you doing today?"
tokens = encoding.encode(text)
print(f"Tokens: {len(tokens)}")  # Output: Tokens: 7

Temperature: Your AI's Personality Dial

Think of temperature like a creativity slider – 0 is robot mode, 1 is jazz musician.

Example Prompt: "Describe a sunset"

Temperature 0.2 (Boring but Reliable):

The sun sets in the west, creating orange and red colors in the sky as daylight fades.

Temperature 0.8 (Creative Chaos):

The sky bleeds tangerine dreams while the sun melts like cosmic butter across the horizon, 
whispering secrets to the waiting stars.

Code Example:

# OpenAI API example
response = openai.ChatCompletion.create(
    model="gpt-3.5-turbo",
    messages=[{"role": "user", "content": "Write a haiku about coffee"}],
    temperature=0.2  # Play with this: 0.0-1.0
)

Cost Control: Token Ninja Techniques

1. Prompt Surgery

Bad (Expensive): "Tell me everything about cats" Good (Cheap): "List 5 cat breeds under 50 words"

2. Context Limits

# Limit conversation history
messages = conversation_history[-5:]  # Only last 5 messages

3. Iterative Approach

Instead of: "Write a complete marketing plan" Try:

1. "Outline a marketing plan in 5 bullet points"

2. "Expand bullet point 1 into a paragraph"

3. "Add 3 specific tactics for social media"

Real Cost Example:

• Novel-length prompt: 2,000 tokens = $0.004 (GPT-3.5)

• Surgical prompt: 200 tokens = $0.0004

• 10x savings with better prompting!

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