Tokenization Methods

Learn how modern language models use tokenization—especially subword methods like BPE—to convert text into model-ready inputs efficiently and intelligently.

Interviewers love to ask about byte-pair encoding (BPE) tokenization because it’s fundamental to how modern language models process text. You’ll often get this question at companies like OpenAI, Google, and other AI-driven firms since BPE is the core of popular models (OpenAI’s GPT series, for example)​. They want to see that you understand how text is broken down for a model, not just that you can call a library function. In other words, explaining BPE well shows you grasp the foundations of tokenization, how models handle vocabulary, and how to deal with new or rare words. It’s a chance for you to demonstrate practical knowledge of tokenization beyond buzzwords.

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