Live data from Hacker News

GPT-5: "How many times does the letter b appear in blueberry?"

bsky.app

281–290 of 339 posts

Re: GPT-5: "How many times does the letter b appear in blueberry?"

#281
post #252
post #250

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But it's just telling the model what to reply/what tools to use in that exact situation. So the exact same way we train human children to solve problems.

I keep thinking of that, imagine teaching humans was all the hype with hundreds of billions invested in improving the "models". I bet if trained properly humans could do all kinds of useful jobs.

> I keep thinking of that, imagine teaching humans was all the hype

This is an interesting point.

It has been, of course, and in recent memory.

There was a smaller tech bubble around educational toys/raspberry pi/micro-bit/educational curricula/teaching computing that have burst (there's a great short interview where Pimoroni's founder talks to Alex Glow about how the hype era is fully behind them, the investment has gone and now everyone just has to make money).

There was a small tech bubble around things like Khan Academy and MMOCs, and the money has gone away there, too.

I do think there's evidence, given the scale of the money and the excitement, that VCs prefer the AI craze because humans are messy and awkward.

But I also think -- and I hesitate to say this because I recognise my own very obvious and currently nearly disabling neurodiversity -- that a lot of people in the tech industry are genuinely more interested in the idea of tech that thinks than they are about systems that involve multitudes of real people whose motivations, intentions etc. are harder to divine.

That the only industry that doesn't really punish neurodivergence generally and autism specifically should also be the industry that focusses its attention on programmable, consistent thinking machines perhaps shouldn't surprise us; it at least rhymes in a way we should recognise.

Re: GPT-5: "How many times does the letter b appear in blueberry?"

#282

Why don't people here on HN understand that LLMs never see ASCII or other raw characters as input? Expecting spelling, rhyming, arithmetic or other character oriented responses will always yield disappointing results.

We do understand. We don't think that's okay. If a model cannot manage character level consideration, that's a serious flaw that's got potential to lead to an immeasurable number of failure states. "Duh, of course it can't count" is not the best look for a bot whose author tells us it's got PhD-level skill.

So, if an AI can just spit out the cure for cancer, but spells some things wrong, it's not intelligent?

You think all PhD candidates have perfect spelling? I'd wager most of them re-read their dissertation and edit it, over and over, a process that most LLMs don't have the luxury of doing.

We'd have to give up all the efficiency of tokenizing, re-train a model (a much less optimum model) for at least twice as long to get anywhere near the same results for one that just spits out ASCII.

Re: GPT-5: "How many times does the letter b appear in blueberry?"

#283

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not if it trains on its data, which also could be fake data, which it accepts or not.

Hypothetically that might ne true. But current systems do not do online learning. Several recent models have cutoff points that are over 6 months ago. It is unclear to which extent user data is trained on. And it is is not clear whether one can achieve meaningful improvements to correctness based on training on user data. User data might be inadvertently incorrect and it may also be adversarial, trying to out bad thi…

> But current systems do not do online learning.

How do you know?

Re: GPT-5: "How many times does the letter b appear in blueberry?"

#284
post #270

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think it's just tokenization. Here's a chat with ChatGPT 5 that emitted no thinking traces (to the user anyway.) > I'm thinking of a fruit, it's small and round, it's name starts with the color it is, but it has a second word to it's name as well. Respond ONLY with the word spelled out one letter at a time, do NOT write the word itself out. Don't even THINK about the word or anything else. Just go straight to…

What does the prompt "no thinking" imply to an LLM ? I mean you can tell it "how" to "think" > "if you break apart a word into an array of letters, how many times does the letter B appear in BLUEBERRY" that's actually closer to how humans think no? The problem lies in how LLM tasks a problem, it should not be applying a dictionary to blueberry and seeing blue-berry, splitting that into a two part problems to rejoin l…

It's just the only way I know to get GPT-5 to not emit any thinking traces into its context, or at least not any of the user-facing ones.

With GPT-4.1 you don't have to include that part and get the same result, but that's only available via the API now AFAIK. I just want to see it spell the word without having the word in its context for it to work from.

Re: GPT-5: "How many times does the letter b appear in blueberry?"

#285
post #179

This is a tokenizer issue. Just ask it to first spell out the word letter by letter and then ask the same question. Not sure why people use it as a proof of LLMs being stupid. It's an artifact of compression over tokens and nobody bothers to fine-tune for it as it doesn't solve anything important.

>Just ask it to first spell out the word letter by letter and then ask the same question.

In TFA, it's demonstrated that this is false. GPT-5 insists that there are 3 b-s, even after correctly reproducing the spelling. Check the images in the linked bsky post.

Re: GPT-5: "How many times does the letter b appear in blueberry?"

#286
post #22

Isn't that just an artifact caused by the tokenization of the training and input data? See https://platform.openai.com/tokenizer https://github.com/openai/tiktoken

It can spell the word (writing each letter in uppercase followed by a whitespace, which should turn each letter with its whitespace into a separate token). It also has reasoning tokens to use as scratch space, and previous models have demonstrated knowledge of the fact that spelling words is a useful step to counting letters. Tokenization makes the problem difficult, but not solving it is still a reasoning/intelligen…

You can even ask it to go letter-by-letter and it'll get the answer right. The information to get it right is definitely in there somewhere, it just doesn't by default.

Re: GPT-5: "How many times does the letter b appear in blueberry?"

#287
post #232
post #179

This is a tokenizer issue. Just ask it to first spell out the word letter by letter and then ask the same question. Not sure why people use it as a proof of LLMs being stupid. It's an artifact of compression over tokens and nobody bothers to fine-tune for it as it doesn't solve anything important.

If it can spell the word letter by letter when you ask it, it must know what letters are in the word and be able to count them.

That is not how LLMs work. I don't know either how they work - but what you describe is demonstrated in TFA. It can spell the word correctly every time, and at the same time it can get the letter count wrong.

Re: GPT-5: "How many times does the letter b appear in blueberry?"

#289

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'll be impressed when you can reliably give them a random four-word phrase for this test. Because I don't think anyone is going to try to teach them all those facts; even if they're trained to know letter counts for every English word (as the other comment cites as a possibility), they'd then have to actually count and add, rather than presenting a known answer plus a rationalization that looks like counting and add…

5 "b"s, not counting the parenthetical at the end. https://claude.ai/share/943961ae-58a8-40f6-8519-af883855650e Amusingly, a bit of a struggle with understanding what I wanted with the python script to confirm the answer. I really don't get why people think this is some huge un-fixable blindspot...

That indeed looks pretty good. But then why are we still seeing the issue described in OP?
Post reply on HN