Do you have a source for that? Seems like an internal detail a corpo wouldn’t publish
Can’t find the exact source–I’m on mobile right now–but the code for the gpt-2 encoder uses a utf-8 to unicode look up table to shrink the vocab size. https://github.com/openai/gpt-2/blob/master/src/encoder.py
Seriously? Python for massive amounts of data? It’s a nice scripting language, but it’s excruciatingly slow
There are bindings in java and c++, but python is the industry standard for AI. The libraries for machine learning are actually written in c++, but use python language bindings. Python doesn’t tend to slow things down since machine learning is gpu-bound anyway. There are also library specific programming languages which urges the user to make pythonic code that can be compiled into c++.