GigaToken
Tokenizer library in Developer tools
Free tokenizer for language models, reported up to 10% faster time to first token and less compute. Critic notes it does not explain why it is faster.
Free tokenizer for language models, reported up to 10% faster time to first token and less compute. Critic notes it does not explain why it is faster.
21 people gave an opinion
- recommend it
- 21
- criticize it
- 0
- approval share
- 100%
Recommended in 2 of 13 months
- November 2025: not recommended
- December 2025: not recommended
- January 2026: not recommended
- February 2026: not recommended
- March 2026: not recommended
- April 2026: not recommended
- May 2026: not recommended
- June 2026: not recommended
- July 2026: recommended
- August 2026: recommended
- September 2026: not recommended
- October 2026: not recommended
- November 2026: not recommended (month in progress)
Why it doesn’t carry the badge
- 21 people recommend itNeeds 10 or more, met.
- Nobody criticizes itNeeds 2 to 1 or better, met.
- Recommended in 2 of 13 monthsNeeds 4 or more, not met.
The same three rules apply to every product, and the badge can’t be bought. How the badge works
What people say about it
The reasons people give, with the number of comments that give each one. Open a reason to read what they said.
Why people recommend it
Each mark is one comment
Praised as impressive, well-done work
“This researcher has done some very impressive work and I'm trying to defend him from the HN dismissive hoards.”
Comment from 23 Jul 2026 in “GigaToken: ~1000x faster Language model tokenization” “It's genuinely mind-bending, incredible ship OP”
Comment from 22 Jul 2026 in “GigaToken: ~1000x faster Language model tokenization” “This is really cool, great work!”
Comment from 22 Jul 2026 in “GigaToken: ~1000x faster Language model tokenization” - Comment from 22 Jul 2026 in “GigaToken: ~1000x faster Language model tokenization”
Faster time to first token
“Time to first token is observable by a human, and they’re reporting up to 10% reduction there.”
Comment from 23 Jul 2026 in “GigaToken: ~1000x faster Language model tokenization” “their benchmarking shows this can speed up time to first token by up to 10%”
Comment from 23 Jul 2026 in “GigaToken: ~1000x faster Language model tokenization” “it's also useful for inference when considering time-to-first-token (TTFT)”
Comment from 22 Jul 2026 in “GigaToken: ~1000x faster Language model tokenization” Saves time, electricity and money
“A massive speedup like this is a nice efficiency savings on some of these data pipelines for sure.”
Comment from 22 Jul 2026 in “GigaToken: ~1000x faster Language model tokenization” “I hope this code get popular, as it will save tons of electricity, money, CO2, etc.”
Comment from 23 Jul 2026 in “GigaToken: ~1000x faster Language model tokenization” Caching and regex ideas are useful
“The caching and replacing the regex for pretokenization seem like generally useful ideas.”
Comment from 23 Jul 2026 in “GigaToken: ~1000x faster Language model tokenization” “this for sure can help inspire a lot of that work”
Comment from 23 Jul 2026 in “GigaToken: ~1000x faster Language model tokenization”
What people said
21 of the 24 comments that mention it, newest first. Each links to the original comment.
“it’s faster than its reference implementation in rust”
“Time to first token is observable by a human, and they’re reporting up to 10% reduction there.”
“their benchmarking shows this can speed up time to first token by up to 10%”
“seems rather basic and simple, yet very effective”
“I hope this code get popular, as it will save tons of electricity, money, CO2, etc.”
“this for sure can help inspire a lot of that work”
“Valuable not only for inference, but for training too (think proprietary datasets).”
“This researcher has done some very impressive work and I'm trying to defend him from the HN dismissive hoards.”
“The caching and replacing the regex for pretokenization seem like generally useful ideas.”
“This can make a huge difference for local models on modest hardware”
“This is exactly what we need!”
“depending on the nature of the inference you're doing it can be quite significant”
“this speedup is not. Good work.”
“the speedup here is probably doing real work in saving you time”
“this would be great for those!”
“It's genuinely mind-bending, incredible ship OP”
“A massive speedup like this is a nice efficiency savings on some of these data pipelines for sure.”
“it's also useful for inference when considering time-to-first-token (TTFT)”
“This is really cool, great work!”
“Doesn't really explain why its faster. "Optimizing for every kind of CPU" is not really enough info.”
“They even added a section ”AI Use Disclosure”, beautiful!”
Counts come from 1,795,640 Hacker News comments, November 2025 to November 2026. How we count. Report a mistake.