what i don't get is that surely it must be perfectly feasible to just implement letter tracking as a separate function that the LLMs can somehow interact with? they can clearly hook up the LLMs to stuff like wikipedia for up to date information..

[–] Smorty@lemmy.blahaj.zone 1 points 5 days ago

And right again, ai enthusiasts have already hooked up LLMs to the ability to write their own code. It's infact super easy to let a model write a script which then countanthe letters.
Then again, it's also the case, that you could just use a normal program for that in the first place.

This whole "how many Rs are there in 'Strawberry' " thing is nice to show people that LLMs can't do everything. But it's also not a reasonable usecase.

You don't hire people to count words in a document, that's what computers are for.

The reason for my LLMs don't read every character individually is because it's way more efficient to let it detect entire words, rather than letters.

Building a "letter tracker" into an LLM would only be useful to specifically make these people happy, who make fun of LLMs not counting the Rs, and literally no one else...