If I succeed in making world's tiniest but fully coherent AI, its gonna prove character level tokenizer is key to AI superiority. It will open way to superior AI intelligence.
All the current popular AI use subword level tokenizer. But that essentially harms their AI. By making vocabulary size bigger, they are leaving less room for AI intelligence.
Character level AI is always gonna have more trainable parameters than subword level AI of same size. thats just math. Bigger vocabulary takes away more parameters.
And when it comes to very small AI models, that difference becomes huge. Having AI of 1 million parameters with subword tokenizer can mean AI only has 200,000 trainable parameters if training data size is big.
Even chatgpt has vocabulary size of over 100,000 tokens. that means such vocabulary gotta take away at bare minimum 20 million parameters, but usually at least 200 million up to 1 billion with bigger models which have more embedding size.
Character level tokenizer reduces vocabulary size to mere 70 to 100 in english language. It reduces vocabulary by at least 1000 times. But it does not take away any AI abilities. Characters in english language can still be used to make any word or sentence. Compared to subword tokenizer, character level tokenizer is much superior in size.
Its like teaching alphabet in school. No one in school learns subword level vocabulary. It would be terribly unpractical and too difficult to use for humans. I assume AI also has it easier using character level than subword level.