Lilly Tech Systems
Learn Tiktokenizer
Understand how AI models break text into tokens, count tokens accurately, visualize tokenization, estimate API costs, and optimize your prompts for efficiency.
What You'll Learn
By the end of this course, you'll understand tokens deeply and be able to optimize any AI workflow for cost and performance.
Understand Tokens
Learn what tokens are, how text is split into subword units, and why different models tokenize the same text differently.
Visualize Tokenization
Use Tiktokenizer's color-coded interface to see exactly how your text is broken into tokens and compare across models.
Estimate Costs
Calculate API costs before making calls, plan budgets for AI projects, and compare pricing across different models.
Optimize Prompts
Reduce token usage to save money, fit more content into context windows, and write token-efficient prompts.
Course Lessons
Follow the lessons in order or jump to any topic you need.
1. Introduction
What is Tiktokenizer? What are tokens? Why token counting matters for context windows, pricing, and prompt optimization.
2. Getting Started
Access the tool, explore the interface, select tokenizers, paste text, and understand the color-coded visualization.
3. Token Counting
Count tokens for different content types. Understand token ratios, multi-language differences, and programmatic counting.
4. Cost Estimation
Calculate API costs, compare pricing across models, optimize prompts for cost, and plan budgets for AI projects.
5. Best Practices
Prompt optimization, context window management, token-efficient formatting, production monitoring, and common gotchas.
Prerequisites
What you need before starting this course.
- No prior experience with tokens or tokenization required
- A web browser to access tiktokenizer.vercel.app
- Basic understanding of AI models is helpful but not required
- For the programmatic sections: familiarity with Python or JavaScript