Mauricio Repetto Ferrero

Use it or lose it! Token diet with TOON to fatten your wallet and help AI understand more

What if we told you that every time you send JSON to an LLM you are paying an invisible "tax"? In the Generative AI era tokens are the new gold, and with standard JSON (with its redundant braces and repeated keys) you are burning them. In this session we will review the history of data notation to understand why current tools are not optimized for LLMs and we will present TOON (Token-Oriented Object Notation), a notation that combines the best of two worlds: the readability of YAML and the density of CSV. But we will not only talk theory, we will also work with real data and see how TOON manages to reduce token consumption compared to JSON. We will also demonstrate something important: spending less does not mean understanding less! Because just by using TOON many benchmarks show improvements in their metrics. It is time to put your data on a diet!