TokenTown: A visual way to understand how LLMs work

(laurentiugabriel.github.io)

50 points | by laurentiurad 2 hours ago

9 comments

  • foltik 19 minutes ago
    I read through the explanations and they’re all typical hand wavy LLM prose, full of jargon, and random tangential details. If you’re going to publicly present this as a learning tool, it would be great if you spent some actual human brain cycles writing and polishing it by hand, rather than just chucking the first thing that claude spits out over the fence. I can pretty much guess the prompt you used and probably get the same thing.
  • GCUMstlyHarmls 0 minutes ago
    "This is not a loop in code: it is a stack of distinct blocks"

    Proceeds to literally loop around 6 times.

  • Hugada 28 minutes ago
    I think you need to know a lot to understand this, so perhaps it should mention what you should already know in order for it to be comprehensible.
  • markstos 6 minutes ago
    From this I learned LLMs are complex and compute-intensive.
  • onlyrealcuzzo 20 minutes ago
    This would be really cool if it did 3Brown 1Blue's style of visualization - but interactively, and allowed you to explore at any stage.
  • hk__2 13 minutes ago
    Can we filter out random vibe-coded projects like this from the homepage?
    • simpledevraf 11 minutes ago
      filtering functionality would be great
  • lionel-messi 41 minutes ago
    this doesnt help at all
    • pluc 20 minutes ago
      Congratulations you're now a senior AI engineer
    • willchis 15 minutes ago
      Just softmax it over the KV cache dude!
  • simpledevraf 10 minutes ago
    interesting approach to describe this topic
  • laurentiurad 2 hours ago
    You can paste text and immediately see how it's split into tokens, along with token IDs, counts, and other details. It's useful for understanding why prompts cost what they do, why context limits behave the way they do, and why models sometimes split words in unexpected places.

    I made it because I kept explaining tokenization to friends and realized there wasn't a simple, interactive tool that focused on learning rather than documentation.

    I'd love feedback on:

    Features that would make it more useful UI improvements Bugs or edge cases you've found

    Hope it's useful!

    • hk__2 15 minutes ago
      > I made it

      *I asked a LLM to make it

      • JojiDoesCode 12 minutes ago
        Honestly this person's whole github pages screams tech grifter