TokenTown: A visual way to understand how LLMs work

(laurentiugabriel.github.io)

61 points | by laurentiurad 4 hours ago ago

19 comments

  • foltik 2 hours ago 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.

    • overtaxed an hour ago ago

      Or more gently...I think this is a great idea, but for the average person (me), dumbing it down a little more may go a long way

  • phikappa 3 minutes ago ago

    I'd suggest the LLM visualiser (1) by Brendan Bycroft. I'm a visual learner and it helped me understand LLMs better than anything else ever could.

    (1) https://bbycroft.net/llm

  • Hugada 2 hours ago 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.

  • GCUMstlyHarmls 2 hours ago ago

    "This is not a loop in code: it is a stack of distinct blocks"

    Proceeds to literally loop around 6 times.

  • onlyrealcuzzo 2 hours ago 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.

  • arcs- an hour ago ago

    I'd appreciate if you could make this mobile ready, with llms I expect this to be very easy

  • lionel-messi 2 hours ago ago

    this doesnt help at all

    • HarHarVeryFunny 2 hours ago ago

      Not to mention that it's got all sort of bugs and traffic discontinuities. I just saw one of those "road train" things (a batch?!) on the central loop "crash" at the "Layer Counter Arch" while other cars just drove straight thru it.

      The "Output Plaza" doesn't seem very outputtish - cars/embeddings seem to loop around back into the input.

      Not sure why the Attention Plaza is occasionally shooting stuff down the storm drains/whatever in the center!

      The sampler as centrifuge is a strange visualization!

      So I guess the takeaway is that LLM are related to cars? Or maybe highways. Was this designed by Schmidhuber?

    • icedchai an hour ago ago

      You're absolutely right!

    • pluc 2 hours ago ago

      Congratulations you're now a senior AI engineer

    • willchis 2 hours ago ago

      Just softmax it over the KV cache dude!

  • markstos 2 hours ago ago

    From this I learned LLMs are complex and compute-intensive.

  • hk__2 2 hours ago ago

    Can we filter out random vibe-coded projects like this from the homepage?

    • simpledevraf 2 hours ago ago

      filtering functionality would be great

  • simpledevraf 2 hours ago ago

    interesting approach to describe this topic

  • laurentiurad 4 hours ago 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 2 hours ago ago

      > I made it

      *I asked a LLM to make it

      • JojiDoesCode 2 hours ago ago

        Honestly this person's whole github pages screams tech grifter