Today, I found a fascinating way to think about “Tokens” in LLMs. It came from a conversation between Jensen Huang and Patrick Collison at a recent Stripe event.
When asked about the future of compute capacity in five years, Jensen smartly dodged that question a bit, but then gave an excellent explanation and analogy about why tokens are the new forces that will power the next decades of humanity.
He explained that we're now producing something unprecedented (and at scale): floating point numbers that possess “value”, which we now call tokens. These tokens are valuable because they encapsulate “intelligence”.
People are now taking these tokens and transforming them into English, French, images, videos, chemicals, proteins, robotic movements, etc. And many are working hard to expand the range of concepts and ideas we can create with these tokens.
He then goes on to made a compelling comparison between tokens and electricity.
In the past industrial revolution, we successfully found a way to convert “atoms” into “electrons” (by boiling water to power electricity turbines). And now, we've discovered a way to convert "electrons" into "tokens" (by using energy to power data centers that train and run LLMs).
When electricity was first introduced, few people understood its value. Today, paying for kilowatts is routine. The same will happen with tokens. Right now, only early adopters and builders are paying tokens. Soon, everyone will be paying for tokens on a daily basis to supercharge productivity and power new products and services. Many new industries will be born from and built on top of tokens.
When I first heard about this way of thinking, I got goosebumps. Perhaps it’s because Jensen has a good storytelling skill that helps him sell what he builds, but I have to admit this way of thinking gave me a brief surge of pride. I'm proud of humanity's collective effort and creativity, which have taken us from living under rocks to building machines that can "think." That's nothing short but a miracle.