diff --git a/libs/langchain/langchain/schema/language_model.py b/libs/langchain/langchain/schema/language_model.py
index 6a46165e43f..8623233807f 100644
--- a/libs/langchain/langchain/schema/language_model.py
+++ b/libs/langchain/langchain/schema/language_model.py
@@ -1,6 +1,7 @@
 from __future__ import annotations
 
 from abc import ABC, abstractmethod
+from functools import lru_cache
 from typing import (
     TYPE_CHECKING,
     Any,
@@ -23,10 +24,8 @@ if TYPE_CHECKING:
     from langchain.callbacks.manager import Callbacks
 
 
-def _get_token_ids_default_method(text: str) -> List[int]:
-    """Encode the text into token IDs."""
-    # TODO: this method may not be exact.
-    # TODO: this method may differ based on model (eg codex).
+@lru_cache(maxsize=None)  # Cache the tokenizer
+def get_tokenizer() -> Any:
     try:
         from transformers import GPT2TokenizerFast
     except ImportError:
@@ -36,7 +35,13 @@ def _get_token_ids_default_method(text: str) -> List[int]:
             "Please install it with `pip install transformers`."
         )
     # create a GPT-2 tokenizer instance
-    tokenizer = GPT2TokenizerFast.from_pretrained("gpt2")
+    return GPT2TokenizerFast.from_pretrained("gpt2")
+
+
+def _get_token_ids_default_method(text: str) -> List[int]:
+    """Encode the text into token IDs."""
+    # get the cached tokenizer
+    tokenizer = get_tokenizer()
 
     # tokenize the text using the GPT-2 tokenizer
     return tokenizer.encode(text)