01
On scale
How much is one million tokens?
Tokens are the currency models count in. One million of them is more — and less — than you'd expect.
5 min
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Looking Glass is an unhurried collection of considered explainers — the models that write for us, the machines that make our coffee, the stars we live by. One piece at a time, held up to the light.
How modern AI systems read, remember, and differ — the first concepts in the archive.
Tokens are the currency models count in. One million of them is more — and less — than you'd expect.
Opus, Sonnet, Haiku, GPT-5, Gemini, and the open-weight frontier — compared on what matters.
A model reads through a sliding viewport. What's inside it, it sees. What falls out, it forgets.
Every word in a sentence quietly reads every other one, then keeps what's relevant. That reading step is attention — the engine inside every transformer.
The ordinary objects and systems we live inside — infrastructure, machines, and media, taken apart and held to the light.
A network with no centre, relaying every message hop by hop — how it routes today, and what we'd rebuild from the rubble if the stack fell.
Nine bars of pressure, water a few degrees off boiling, and seven grams of coffee — a contained thermodynamic event that resolves in under half a minute.
A game score isn't a recording — it's a system of stems the engine remixes in real time. Drive it yourself.
Series II arrives when it’s ready. The archive is the roadmap.