The question is, did these LLMs figured it out by themselves or has someone programmed a specific coroutine to address this „issue“, to make it look smarter than it is?

On a trillion dollar budget, you could just crawl the web for AI tests people came up with and solve them manually. We know it‘s a massively curated game. With that kind of money you can do a lot of things. You could feed every human on earth countless blueberries for starters.

Calling an algorithm to count letters in a word isn’t exactly worth the hype tho is it?

The point is, we tend to find new ways these LLMs can’t figure out the most basic shit about the world. Horses can count. Counting is in everything. If you read every text ever written and still can’t grasp counting you simply are not that smart.