How to count tokens before sending an API request to ChatGPT
When utilizing the ChatGPT API, it's important to grasp the idea of tokens. Think of tokens as fragments or parts of words. Before the API begins handling the prompts, they disassemble the input into these individual tokens. An interesting aspect is that tokens may not align perfectly with the beginning or end of words - they could encompass trailing spaces or even divide words into sub-parts.
Note: To learn how to obtain ChatGPT's API, click here.
Understanding tokens
For instance, the phrase 'Wie geht's' ('How are you' in German) consists of 6 tokens (for 10 chars). This higher token-to-char ratio can escalate the cost of employing the API for languages other than English.
The model used sets the token limit for requests. A maximum of 4097 tokens can be used that are shared between the prompt and completion. If your prompt uses up 3000 tokens, you can, at most, generate a completion of 1097 tokens. This cap is a current technical constraint. However, there are frequently clever methods to navigate these constraints, such as condensing your text, splitting it into smaller segments, and so forth.
Note: To learn more about tokenization in NLP, click here.
Counting tokens
To count the number of tokens in a text string, you can use a tokenizer. A tokenizer splits the text string into a list of tokens. For example, you could utilize the Tiktoken library, a fast transformers package for Python or the gpt-3-encoder package for node.js.
Here’s an example of how you can count tokens using Tiktoken in Python:
import tiktokenencoding = tiktoken.encoding_for_model("gpt-3.5-turbo")text = "This is an example sentence to count tokens."token_count = len(encoding.encode(text))print(f"The text contains {token_count} tokens.")
Code explanation:
Line 1: Import the necessary libraries.
Line 3: Initialize the
encodingwith thegpt-3.5-turbomodel.Line 5: Define the text string we want to count tokens for.
Line 6: Encode the text string into tokens and count the number of tokens.
Line 7: Print out the number of tokens in the text string.
Note: Remember to replace
This is an example sentence to count tokens.with your own text string.
Considerations for token counting
In tallying tokens, it’s crucial to bear in mind that the division of words into tokens is dependent on the language. Additionally, tokens might encompass trailing spaces and even subdivisions of words. As such, the token tally of a text string might differ from the word count or the character count.
Moreover, the quantity of tokens influences the cost of API requests and the maximum length of text that can be dispatched to the API. Hence, it’s a wise practice to tally tokens prior to dispatching an API request, ensuring you do not surpass the token limit and estimate the cost of the API request.
Conclusion
Counting tokens prior to sending an API request to ChatGPT is a vital step to ensure that the token limit is not exceeded and to gauge the cost of the API request. By grasping how tokens function and how to tally them, you can utilize the ChatGPT API more effectively.
