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Outcome School · Other AI topics11 min read

by Amit Shekhar · 31 March 2026

Byte Pair Encoding in LLMs

BPE (Byte Pair Encoding) - the tokenization algorithm used by most modern Large Language Models (LLMs) to break text into smaller pieces before processing it.

2,008 words#llm#ai#machine-learning4 recall cards

Byte Pair Encoding in LLMs
Read on Outcome School ↗then come back to lock it in
Before you read, guess

How can text be segmented for processing?

Ten seconds, a guess, then read — a wrong guess still makes the answer stick.

What this article covers

  1. What is Tokenization?
  2. The Problem: How to Break Text into Tokens?
  3. What is BPE (Byte Pair Encoding)?
  4. How BPE Works: Step by Step
  5. How BPE Tokenizes New Text
  6. Why BPE is Used in Modern LLMs

The article lives on outcomeschool.com. Read it there, then come back: the tutor in the margin has read it and will answer questions, and the questions below check what stayed.

Before you go

In one sentence, what was this chapter about?

From memory, without scrolling up. Writing it is what makes it yours; the grade is only to show you what you had.

How sure?