LLM is worse at non-English languages
Author: 7CDCreated Nov 10, 2024Updated Jul 13, 2025
Andrej in his YouTube video noted that LLMs are worse at non-English languages, partly due to tokenization. Basically, for less represented languages, even frequent pairs of characters appear less frequently in the corpus than most of English pairs. Hence, fewer merges occur in BPE for these languages and their token representation ends up being lengthy. Isn’t it a good idea to build tokens for each language separately and for distinct domains e.g., python code?
Source: karpathy/minbpe