Science & Technology

AI can’t spell strawberry. Here’s why | TechCrunch Minute

How many times does the letter R appear in strawberry? If you ask ChatGPT, Claude, or other AI chatbots, the answer is twice. If AI can write essays in the blink of an eye, or solve equations in seconds, why is it so hard to spell? LLMs are trained on boatloads of data, but when…

Published

on

How many times does the letter R appear in strawberry? If you ask ChatGPT, Claude, or other AI chatbots, the answer is twice. If AI can write essays in the blink of an eye, or solve equations in seconds, why is it so hard to spell? LLMs are trained on boatloads of data, but when the LLM interprets whatever we’re typing into ChatGPT, the AI isn’t really reading the words we’re typing.

This episode of the Techcrunch Minute is sponsored by Aerospace.

Subscribe for more on YouTube:

Follow TechCrunch on Instagram:
TikTok:
X:
Facebook:

Read more:

15 Comments

  1. @HardKore5250

    August 29, 2024 at 1:21 pm

    Not quite you can teach it and then it gets it right

    • @MegaAlterSchwede

      August 29, 2024 at 3:01 pm

      But you wouldn’t need to teach a human how to count the characters. I think one basic problem here is, that the tokenizing is done first and does not use single characters. The LLM behind the tokenizer can not count the characters, because it is just receiving two numbers, e.g. 18912378 for “straw” and 2848384 for “berry”. It either would need to “learn” that the token 2848384 contains 2 R’s one B, one E and one Y. Or it would need to change the tokenizer on the spot to tokenize each character of that specific word.

    • @chistinelane

      August 30, 2024 at 9:37 pm

      ​@@MegaAlterSchwedebut we do need to teach humans how to count and how to spell and how to count how many letters in words.

      That’s why we send kids to school!

  2. @velhoguidsd

    August 29, 2024 at 3:29 pm

    A.I. skipped Elementary School.

  3. @tijgertalks2875

    August 30, 2024 at 6:39 am

    Please use only your inductive reasoning to determine how many times the letter “r” appears in the word “strawberry.”

  4. @hobbanero

    August 30, 2024 at 1:54 pm

    If you ask it the same question, but tell it to use python, it gets the correct answer. So AI can’t spell, but it can code.

  5. @drbanana-g2j

    August 30, 2024 at 3:00 pm

    How many times a letter appears in a word is not a spelling question. It is a counting question.

    • @SyntaxDaemon

      September 5, 2024 at 12:32 pm

      And the ai doesn’t know the difference.

  6. @Sociology_Tube

    August 30, 2024 at 10:26 pm

    random non patterned aribitrary rules are not followable by logical robots. unless you GIVE THEM the exception. Expecting it to learn the aribitrary historical truths of culture is obsence to the mind.

  7. @DoNhatMinhhh

    August 31, 2024 at 10:21 am

    No.
    When you ask Chat GPT how many “R”s are in “Strawberry” it will simply count the R’s in the spelling of the word “Strawberry” which is: “Strô,berē” and as you can see, “Strô,berē” only has two R’s because the “rr” merged and sound like one R. Nobody say: Straw Ber Ry instead they say Straw bery.

    Chat GPT will only give you the right answer (Which is 3) when you ask it “How many R are in the word Strawberry, not the spelling of Strawberry.”

    Hope this help!

    • @boa_keine_ahnung

      August 31, 2024 at 1:32 pm

      or “how many letters “r” does the word strawberry have?”

  8. @russmathis65

    September 1, 2024 at 3:45 pm

    This approach works: SHOW EACH LETTER IN THE WORLD STRAWBERRY AND COUNT THE LETTERS R

  9. @skoorbstudios9171

    September 3, 2024 at 12:20 am

    i had a conversation with Chat GPT and i convinced it that ‘strawberry’ has three ‘r’s. it was kinda a process but i basically asked it how many ‘r’s were in ‘straw’ and how many ‘r’s were in ‘berry’, and when it said ‘berry’ only contained one ‘r’, i asked it to spell out ‘berry’, and so when it responded with ‘B-E-R-R-Y’, i asked it how many ‘r’s were in ‘B-E-R-R-Y’, and it said two, so then I asked Chat GPT to confirm there were two ‘r’s in ‘berry’ and it apologized and accepted it’s mistake, and now it says there are three ‘r’s in ‘strawberry’. You’re welcome people.

  10. @MikaelLindberg

    September 3, 2024 at 10:04 pm

    It can’t even make a sign with the text I tell it how to spell!

  11. @genericsidecharacter8915

    September 4, 2024 at 3:35 am

    Neuro-sama got it right first try

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Trending

Exit mobile version