Modern AI feels like magic until you peek under the hood and realize it is more like a highly disciplined assembly line of linguistic fragments. This piece rebuilds the core ideas from Naveen Kumar VRâs original explanation into a more structured engineering perspective, while keeping the intuition intact and sharpening the technical clarity.
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Tokens: The Fundamental Unit of Language Models
Large language models do not process text as humans do. They do not see full words or letters in isolation. Instead, they operate on tokens, which are compressed chunks of text.
A token can be:
