LLMs

BPE (Byte-Pair Encoding)

Subword tokenisation that starts from bytes and iteratively merges the most frequent adjacent pair.

Why interviewers ask about it

Non-English text can cost 3–5× more tokens; digit tokenisation inconsistency hurts arithmetic; trailing whitespace changes completions. All downstream cost estimates should be in tokens.

This term is part of the free AI/ML Engineer interview preparation module - browse the full glossary for every definition.