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Why not Mandarin Chinese? Logographic is pretty compact. Also, this really should be more precise that it’s talking about neo-caveman. Legit caveman no speak English.
Why not Mandarin Chinese? Logographic is pretty compact. Also, this really should be more precise that it’s talking about neo-caveman. Legit caveman no speak English.
Putting aside the question of whether English's larger training corpus would be a dimension of quality: content is "tokenized" before the model sees it. The "~4 English chars/token" rule isn't a strategy to optimize around because in practice, many English words become one token, the same way Chinese words do.
"I love you" and "我爱你" both tokenize down to 3 tokens. So no efficiency gains from a Chinese translation. "Telephone" is just one token, and "电话" (Chinese word for telephone that spans 2 characters) also gets condensed into one token. Sometimes there are minor gains, like "经济" being one token but "economy" being two. But it doesn't end up materializing in the gain you'd hope for by increasing meaning-per-character.
You can play around with OpenAI's tokenizer here. Great for getting particular about how to save tokens in prompt and tool definitions https://platform.openai.com/tokenizer
When Sabrewulf[1] come, some fight, some run ... some run in cave. No good. Bad.
Token cost. Seem smart less token. But already discount. No profit.
Use less token? Price go up.
What money?
You should be bothered by the persistent & popular use of the "caveman" terminology and the myth surrounding it. However, from a dedicated amateur linguistic point of view, the "caveman language" that so many people seem to know by default is kind of remarkable. Perhaps it points to (it doesn't) some deeper, ancient understanding.
[0] this is a joke because the caveman myth comes with a lot of misogynistic baggage and you should have a problem with it. Also because I made you read this. (this is not an explanation of the joke itself, that's up to you)
[1] the sabre-tooth cat is a trope that over-represents its relationship with people. I mean it's extinct, but it was around "back then", right?
uninstall caveman install ponytail
Why not Mandarin Chinese? Logographic is pretty compact. Also, this really should be more precise that it’s talking about neo-caveman. Legit caveman no speak English.
Heh, deepseek is known to randomly switch to Chinese output for no reason at all. As I was using Claude chat as a poor man’s reviewer, I just pasted it over and Claude interpreted it without skipping a beat and responded in English.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Actually, when you translate Chinese literally word for word, it sounds a lot like caveman English. 你不去，我也不去 You no go, I also no go 今天这里人很多 Today here person very many 下雨就不去 Fall rain then no go
If you translate English literally (a very analytical language) to a very synthetic language (eg. Latin), it also sounds like caveman spreak
Vulgar latin does correspond to modern romance languages (and english) much more closely.
Why not Mandarin Chinese? Logographic is pretty compact. Also, this really should be more precise that it’s talking about neo-caveman. Legit caveman no speak English.
Since the information density is about the same in all (spoken) languages, there shouldn't be much of a difference. But maybe one writing system is better suited for LLMs.