This is a glitch token [1]! As the article hypothesizes, they seem to occur when a word or token is very common in the original, unfiltered dataset that was used to make the tokenizer, but then removed from there before GPT-XX was trained. This results in the LLM knowing nothing about the semantics of a token, and the results can be anywhere from buggy to disturbing.
A common example is usernames that participated on the r/counting subreddit, where some names appear hundreds of thousands of times. OpenAI has fixed most of them for the hosted models (not sure how, I could imagine by tokenizing them differently), but looks like you found a new one!
A common example is usernames that participated on the r/counting subreddit, where some names appear hundreds of thousands of times. OpenAI has fixed most of them for the hosted models (not sure how, I could imagine by tokenizing them differently), but looks like you found a new one!
[1] https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/aPeJE8bSo6rAFoLqg/solidgoldm...