You don’t. That’s the gracefull degradation part. You can still read your chat history and send new messages, but receiving messages as they come requires page reload or enabling js.

That’s when you get into more of the nuance with tokenization. It’s not a simple lookup table, and the AI does not have access to the original definitions of the tokens. Also, tokens do not map 1:1 onto words, and a word might be broken into several tokens. For example “There’s” might be broken into “There” + “'s”, and “strawberry” might be broken into “straw” + “berry”.

The reason we often simplify it as token = words is that it is the case for most of the common words.

Each word gets converted to a number before it is processed, so asking how many “how many r are there in strawberry” could be converted to “how many 7 are there in 13”, for example.

(Very simplified)