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Recently, there has been a huge explosion of crayfish (OpenClaw), and everyone in various groups is saying: how many Tokens were consumed, how many Tokens were deducted, tens of thousands of Tokens just disappeared…
What exactly is the Token everyone is talking about? Why is it tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands?
The Token here is completely different from the proposals in your Web3. It refers to the smallest unit when AI models process text.
It's neither a word nor just a single character.
In English: 1 Token ≈ 0.75 words
In Chinese: 1 Chinese character ≈ 1 Token
For example:
Hello world is approximately 2 Tokens
你好世界 is approximately 4 Tokens
ChatGPT is great! is approximately 5 Tokens
In AI, OpenClaw, and various API calls, Tokens are hard currency, billing units, and also represent capacity limits.
It actually serves 3 main purposes:
1. Calculating costs: the more Tokens you use, the more fees you incur
2. Length limits: for example, a context of 128k Tokens, if it can't fit, it will forget things
3. Measuring input and output: the more you ask, the longer the AI's response, and the Tokens will burn faster!
If you are a developer, playing with LLM, or building RAG systems,
you need to distinguish between two key concepts:
1️⃣Prompt Tokens: what you input, the questions you ask AI
2️⃣Completion Tokens: what AI returns to you, the generated content
The two together are the total Tokens you burned in this round.
The word Token has completely different meanings in different contexts:
In NLP/AI: it's called a marker or tokenization
In login/API: it's called a token
In identity systems: it's called a credential
In the Web3 circle: it's the cryptocurrency we commonly refer to
So back to the context of this crayfish explosion:
The Tokens in everyone's mouth
are actually the "computational power consumption" of AI at work.
When you let AI operate automatically, run scripts, interact on-chain, and process data,
it burns Tokens with every action, every statement, and every piece of logic it runs,
everything is consuming Tokens, and spending 💰!
#token #OPENCLAW