💡 AI concepts

Tokens

Tokens are the basic units of text that AI language models process, where each token represents a word, part of a word, or a punctuation mark.

by Navid Moazzez·1 min read

When you interact with an AI tool like ChatGPT or Claude, your text is broken into tokens before being processed. Roughly, 1 token equals about 0.75 words — so a 1,000-word article is about 1,333 tokens.

Why tokens matter for creators

Cost: Many AI APIs charge per token, so longer prompts and outputs cost more
Context window: Every model has a maximum number of tokens it can handle in a single conversation
Speed: More tokens means longer processing time

Practical tips

Keep prompts concise but clear to save tokens
Use models with larger context windows (100K+ tokens) for long documents
When using AI APIs for your products, monitor token usage to control costs

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Navid Moazzez

Navid Moazzez is a law school dropout turned lifestyle entrepreneur, creator, online marketing expert, investor, digital nomad and global citizen. Now he's teaching you all his best secrets.

More AI terms

View all AI terms

AI models

Large language model (LLM)

A large language model (LLM) is a type of AI trained on massive amounts of text that can understand and generate human language, powering tools like ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini.

AI techniques

Prompt engineering

Prompt engineering is the practice of crafting effective inputs for AI models to get better, more relevant, and more useful outputs.

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