Amazingly, 2/5 LLMs I asked consistently (I only tested a few times) gave a reasonable answer (usually "two", but occasionally "three") and explanation for: How many words in "AI researcher?"

"Four" is completely bogus no matter how you measure it, even if it's in a list of alternatives. Also the word "engineer" definitely isn't in there. "researcher" is present, and "er" isn't even a word!

I'm of two minds on the one that explicitly argued (without prompting) that the question mark counts as a word. But it failed other times anyway.