alt Hacker NewsWhat's amazing is that they even can fairly reliably appear to count characters. I mean we're talking about systems that infer sequences not character counters or calculators. They are amazing in unrelated ways and we need to accept this so we can use them effectively.
Replies
girvo • today at 11:33 AM
Of course, they’re shockingly powerful, just in an incredibly “spiky” way
I suspect character counting - counting small numbers in general in fact - is something that multimodal models will gradually learn through their visual capabilities. We have generative systems that are capable of generating an image of the word ‘strawberry’, and of counting how many strawberries are visible in an image; seems likely it’s possible for an LLM to ‘imagine’ what the word strawberry looks like and count the ‘Rs’ it can ‘see’.