I’ve already had more than one conversation where people quote AI as if it were a source, like quoting google as a source. When I showed them how it can sometimes lie and explain it’s not a primary source for anything I just get that blank stare like I have two heads.
I think I have seen this exact post word for word fifty times in the last year.
And yet they apparently still can’t get an accurate result with such a basic query.
Meanwhile… https://futurism.com/openai-signs-deal-us-government-nuclear-weapon-security
That happens when do you not understand what is a llm, or what its usecases are.
This is like not being impressed by a calculator because it cannot give a word synonym.
Doc: That’s an interesting name, Mr…
Fletch: Babar.
Doc: Is that with one B or two?
Fletch: One. B-A-B-A-R.
Doc: That’s two.
Fletch: Yeah, but not right next to each other, that’s what I thought you meant.
Doc: Isn’t there a children’s book about an elephant named Babar.
Fletch: Ha, ha, ha. I wouldn’t know. I don’t have any.
Doc: No children?
Fletch: No elephant books.
It’s predictive text on speed. The LLMs currently in vogue hardly qualify as A.I. tbh…
You asked a stupid question and got a stupid response, seems fine to me.
Yes, nobody asking that question is wonderring about the “straw” part of the word. They’re asking, is the “berry” part one, or two "r"s
Works fine for me in o3-mini-high:
Counting letters in “strawberry”
Alright, I’m checking: the word “strawberry” is spelled S T R A W B E R R Y. Let me count the letters: S (1), T (2), R (3), A (4), W (5), B (6), E (7), R (8), R (9), Y (10). There are three R’s: in positions 3, 8, and 9. So, the answer is 3. Even if we ignore case, the count still holds. Therefore, there are 3 r’s in “strawberry.”
Finally! With a household energy consumption for one day we can count how many Rs are in strawberry.
A normal person would say ‘strawberry with two "r"s’
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It is wrong. Strawberry has 3 r’s
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there are two 'r’s in ‘strawbery’
Skill issue
How many strawberries could a strawberry bury if a strawberry could bury strawberries 🍓
I’ve been avoiding this question up until now, but here goes:
Hey Siri …
- how many r’s in strawberry? 0
- how many letter r’s in the word strawberry? 10
- count the letters in strawberry. How many are r’s? ChatGPT ……2
What would have been different about this if it had impressed you? It answered the literal question and also the question the user was actually trying to ask.
It didn’t? StRawbeRy has 2 rs. StRawbeRRy has 3.
OHHHHHHH… my bad. I’m an idiot. Being an LLM it’s giving the answer it thinks a human such as myself would come up with.
The terrifying thing is everyone criticising the LLM as being poor, however it excelled at the task.
The question asked was how many R in strawbery and it answered. 2.
It also detected the typo and offered the correct spelling.
What’s the issue I’m missing?
The issue that you are missing is that the AI answered that there is 1 ‘r’ in ‘strawbery’ even though there are 2 'r’s in the misspelled word. And the AI corrected the user with the correct spelling of the word ‘strawberry’ only to tell the user that there are 2 'r’s in that word even though there are 3.
Sure, but for what purpose would you ever ask about the total number of a specific letter in a word? This isn’t the gotcha that so many think it is. The LLM answers like it does because it makes perfect sense for someone to ask if a word is spelled with a single or double “r”.
It makes perfect sense if you do mental acrobatics to explain why a wrong answer is actually correct.
Not mental acrobatics, just common sense.
Except many many experts have said this is not why it happens. It cannot count letters in the incoming words. It doesn’t even know what “words” are. It has abstracted tokens by the time it’s being run through the model.
It’s more like you don’t know the word strawberry, and instead you see: How many 'r’s in 🍓?
And you respond with nonsense, because the relation between ‘r’ and 🍓 is nonsensical.