alt Hacker News> There are very principled reasons why LLMs do not know how many letters are in words, and it says nothing about their facility for understanding meaning. … Tokens are the most basic input unit of an LLM. But tokens don't generally correspond to words or letters, rather sub-word sequences. So Strawberry might be broken up into two tokens 'straw' and 'berry'.
This sounds like a description of a child who has not learned to read yet. You ask a child who is not aware of the alphabet and of "words" how many r's are in strawberry you'd get a non-sense answer too. So what you're really pointing out is that the LLMs have not been trained on "the english language" and how words are constructed and what they are composed of. That they operate by tokens that don't correspond to words or letters is irrelevant as an answer to why they can't count the letters in a word. It's not that I know how many r's are in strawberry because of how I'm understanding the word "strawberry", I know how many r's are in strawberry because I know how to spell strawberry. The LLM needs to be trained on this the same way someone who is learning to read would be trained on it. No one should be surprised that an LLM can't "read" in the same way no one should be surprised that a child can't "read".
>That they operate by tokens that don't correspond to words or letters is irrelevant as an answer to why they can't count the letters in a word.
This interpretation takes things too far away from how LLMs are constituted and so misses important explanatory power. The issue of counting letters in a word isn't about an ability to spell, it's about the nature of one's perception. We perceive words as sequences of individual letters. LLMs do not. I can ask you to tell me how many r's are in some nonsense word sequence and you're fully capable of doing that. LLMs do not see sequences of letters so they are intrinsically at a disadvantage for this kind of question. But this says nothing about its capacity for intelligence anymore than not naturally being able to distinguish frequencies of photons hitting your retina has anything to say about human intelligence.