Tokens and Numbers

Remember our robot student Robo? 🤖
Now let’s teach Robo how to read words using numbers — because Robo doesn’t read like humans do!

You give Robo a sentence:

“Cats are cute.”

Robo is confused 😕. He doesn’t know what “cats” or “cute” means.

So you give him a magic dictionary that turns words into numbers:

Now the sentence becomes:

"Cats are cute." → [2686, 2024, 10140, 1012]

But wait! Smart language AI add special tokens to mark the beginning and end:

So the final version Robo sees is:

[101, 2686, 2024, 10140, 1012, 102]

🎉 Now Robo can read! (Sort of.)

Not yet! Robo can read numbers, but he doesn’t know what they mean.

So you also teach him the correct answer (we call this the label).

You give Robo a bunch of sentence examples:

You turn them into numbers:

Now Robo can practice!

He does this thousands of times, until he gets really good!

After all this practice, you give him a new sentence:

"I love chocolate!"

He turns it into numbers:

[101, 1045, 2293, 6821, 1012, 102]

And Robo says:

“I think this means Happy → Label 1” ✅

Success! Robo now understands what feelings a sentence might have.

🧠 By the way — a model is like Robo’s brain.
It’s what remembers all the learning, and helps Robo make smart guesses.

So when we train a model in language AI, it’s like:

That’s how token IDs and labels work together to teach our robot friend how to understand language!