BizTech Q&A 63: I don’t know what a token is!

Answering your questions about business and technology

Question

I see that Google Gemini 3 has a 1 million token context window. How much is that  in non-techie terms?

~ Anonymous

Answer

Hello,

Yeah, I feel like there’s a sharknado of terms these days for people who don’t hang out in tech circles.  (Are you questioning my “sharknado”?  Tsunami seemed overused…)

Hopefully you are a book reader (or that book references will help you make sense of tokens…)  If so, here are some book comparisons for 1 million tokens:

• • Harry Potter Series - 7 books - About 70% would fit
  • The Lord of the Rings Trilogy and the Hobbit - 100% would fit with space left over
  • War and Peace - 100% would fit with space left over
  • Les Miserables - 100% would fit with space left over
  • King James Bible - Old and New Testaments - 100% would fit
    • This is probably the closest to 1 million of everything on the list
      
      

If books didn’t help, then hopefully one of these will land:

• • Roughly 750,000 words
  • About 1500 pages
  • If you read at average speed, it would take about 50 hours of non-stop reading
  • If you type 40 words per minute - 8 hours per day, 5 days per week, it would take 2 months of typing

TL:DR - A lot

And if it isn’t enough, you can just start a new chat and get a new 1 million…

Hope that helps

~ Damien