How many R’s are in “strawberry”? You count three. Chatbots famously said two. The reason is that a language model never sees letters.
In this Short: a tokenizer chops your text into tokens, each token becomes an ID number (for GPT-4o, ” strawberry” in a sentence is a single ID), so to count letters the model has to recall how that ID is spelled, and it often slips. Newer models often get it right by spelling the word out first.
You see ten letters. The model sees one token.
Narration is AI-generated (synthetic voice). Visuals are original animation.
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