Modern Tokenization Explained: BPE, WordPiece, and SentencePiece for LLMs
A clear and intuitive explanation of modern tokenization for LLMs: why word-level and character-level fail, how subwords solve both extremes, how BPE merges frequent pairs, how WordPiece optimizes likelihood, how SentencePiece handles multilingual text, and why tokenization affects cost, context length, and model quality



