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The Life of a Token: from Words to Bits on the Wire

arXiv · AI, language, vision and robotics · article · Sep 17, 2026 · UTC

Large Language Models (LLMs) transform vast collections of unstructured text into semantic patterns used for language generation and reasoning tasks. Behind their ease of use lies a complex process: words become tokens, tokens become vectors, and vectors ultimately give rise to streams of bits that flow through High-Performance Computing (HPC) systems. As modern LLMs grow to billions or trillions of parameters, this path increasingly unfolds across thousands of interconnected accelerators, making the underlying communication fabric a critical and often opaque component of model training. This

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