alt Hacker NewsYeah, Anthropic's current tokenizer in Sonnet 5/Opus 4.8/Fable 5 is much worse than OpenAI's. Also, OpenAI has been using their current o200k_base from the day GPT-4o came out over two years ago. Just a few of my own tests:
- A ~2000-2002 legacy C++ game codebase at about ~90kloc: GPT 1.12M, Claude 2.2M
- A ~30kloc TypeScript codebase: GPT 260K, Claude 437K
In the end, GPT's current tokenizer is ~1.6x-2x better than Claude's current one, depending on your data. And you can check for free for both, for OpenAI just use the open-source libraries, for Anthropic - you have to use their count_tokens endpoint as they don't publish the tokenizer, but the endpoint is free (and allows requests over 1M tokens as well).
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you use the wrong word
the Anthropic tokenizer is not worse, its more expensive/verbose
Interesting... Naively I'd assume you'd have a pretty unfair advantage on quality if you have materially more information dense tokens.
That doesn't really appear to be the case as GPT and Anthropic models appear evenly matched despite Anthropic encoding the same text into almost ~2x the tokens...
I'd also - naively - assume this would make training their models more expensive. Though inference now dominates, and they'd probably rather have more tokens than less (to charge you for them at future 80% margins).