AI Still Struggles to Count the Number of R’s in Strawberry. Why?
When asked how many “R’s” appear in the word strawberry AI will frequently quote two. This prompt/shortcoming went viral last summer but why does it persist. Why do large language models have hard time with something so seemingly simple?
It essentially comes down to how how the models work. Words and prompts are tokenized so the models never “see” the word strawberry. This leads to…guessing.
If you were to ask the AI to count the number of occurrences of the letter “r” in the word “strawberry,” it wouldn’t have such a fine representation of the word from which the number and position of every instance of that letter could be derived. Instead, it answers in the mold of what it has learned about forming predictions from the structure of the request. Of course, this may be inaccurate, because the data it learned from is not about counting letters, and may not even include the type of material it would take to trace the “r” in our example word.
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