diff --git a/llama.cpp b/llama.cpp
index d3adda11b..bdf243701 100644
--- a/llama.cpp
+++ b/llama.cpp
@@ -1654,9 +1654,17 @@ static void llm_load_vocab(
 
         if (tokenizer_name == "llama") {
             vocab.type = LLAMA_VOCAB_TYPE_SPM;
+
+            // default special tokens
+            vocab.special_bos_id = 1;
+            vocab.special_eos_id = 2;
+            vocab.special_unk_id = 0;
+            vocab.special_sep_id = -1;
+            vocab.special_pad_id = -1;
         } else if (tokenizer_name == "gpt2") {
             vocab.type = LLAMA_VOCAB_TYPE_BPE;
 
+            // read bpe merges and populate bpe ranks
             const int merges_keyidx = gguf_find_key(ctx, kv(LLM_KV_TOKENIZER_MERGES).c_str());
             if (merges_keyidx == -1) {
                 throw std::runtime_error("cannot find tokenizer merges in model file\n");
@@ -1677,12 +1685,19 @@ static void llm_load_vocab(
                     second = word.substr(pos + 1);
                 }
 
-                // populate bpe ranks
                 vocab.bpe_ranks.emplace(std::make_pair(first, second), i);
             }
+
+            // default special tokens
+            vocab.special_bos_id = 11;
+            vocab.special_eos_id = 11;
+            vocab.special_unk_id = -1;
+            vocab.special_sep_id = -1;
+            vocab.special_pad_id = -1;
         } else {
             LLAMA_LOG_WARN("%s: unknown tokenizer: '%s'", __func__, tokenizer_name.c_str());
             LLAMA_LOG_WARN("%s: using default tokenizer: 'llama'", __func__);
+
             vocab.type = LLAMA_VOCAB_TYPE_SPM;
         }
     }