One Ruler to Measure Them All: How Language Affects LLM Quality

Most discussions about LLM performance focus on the model architecture and prompting. But there's a hidden factor: the tokenizer. It determines how much of your text fits in the context window.

The Tokenizer Problem

Russian text consumes more tokens than English for the same information density. Some developers even switch to English prompts to save tokens and improve performance.

The Surprising Result