And if it is characters (as it is for some models), its more than 26 of them for English. Between space, case, punctuation, and digits, its basically 7-bit ASCII without most of the control characters (newline is semantically important, the rest not), almost 100 characters.

The number of tokens is more in the range of 40k to 250k tokens.

Right.

Whereas for pixels there are over 16 million.

How many more than 250k is that?

Over 16 million.

More like 256 of them, just an image is actually 3 layers with RGB. If you are going into combinations, I could easily say that triplets of tokens are actually what's important, and so 250k^3 is the real number of whatever.

Depends on the LLM. Character based LLMs exist, and even have advantages vs regular LLMs...