What are token counts?

Token counts are how many words or pieces of words a computer uses to understand something.

Imagine you're reading a storybook, each word is like a token. Now, imagine the book is really long, and you want to know exactly how many words are in it, that’s like counting the tokens.

Think of tokens as colorful building blocks. Each block has one or two letters on it, sometimes just a letter, like "a" or "b", other times more than one, like "cat" or "dog". A computer looks at these blocks to understand what the whole sentence means.

If you're writing a message and the computer can only use 100 blocks, that’s like having only 100 words in your letter. But if it has more, say 500 blocks, then you can write much longer messages!

So, token counts are just how many little pieces of text a computer uses to read and understand what you're saying, like counting how many blocks you used to build your tower.