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Models
Tokens
The atomic units of text a model processes. Roughly 0.75 words each in English.
Models do not see characters or words — they see tokens, which are statistical sub-word units learned during training. "Hello, world" is about 3 tokens. Pricing is per-million-tokens of input and output (output costs ~5× input). Token counts are how you reason about context window limits and cost. Provider tokenizers differ slightly, so token counts are model-family-specific.
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