Chinese being more token efficient is a myth, and seems to stem from the superficial fact that characters are only visually more space efficient.
The fact that each Chinese character takes up 3 bytes (as opposed to 1 byte of English), words in Chinese typically require compounds of several characters, and that tokenizers have a limited vocabulary limited to mostly English means that Chinese is actually token inefficient.
It’s beneficial for reasoning to have models trained in a few languages. Chinese is a good one because one character is one word is one token.
Chinese being more token efficient is a myth, and seems to stem from the superficial fact that characters are only visually more space efficient.
The fact that each Chinese character takes up 3 bytes (as opposed to 1 byte of English), words in Chinese typically require compounds of several characters, and that tokenizers have a limited vocabulary limited to mostly English means that Chinese is actually token inefficient.
No, Chinese Is Not More Token-Efficient Than English for LLMs | markhuang.ai - https://markhuang.ai/blog/chinese-token-myth
I didn’t say it’s more token efficient. I said training multiple languages improves reasoning.