When people see ChatGPT or Claude answer fluently in Swahili or Thai, the natural impression is that the model "knows" all languages equally well. It doesn't — and the gap isn't cosmetic. It runs straight through the architecture of how these models read and process text. What follows is a breakdown of where that gap actually comes from, how large it is, and what's being done about it. 1. The problem starts before the model "thinks" — at tokenization An LLM never reads text direc...