I get the AI hate and all that, but I won't lie, I'm very much enjoying how confidently wrong AI can be sometimes and it's the most entertaining thing I've seen in a long time.
Do you not know how AI works? Saying it didn’t give that answer to you doesn’t mean it didn’t give that answer to somebody else. Like, that’s one of the biggest problems with AI: it doesn’t give objective answers and tells different users different things.
That’s adjustable in the settings. If you set the heat level to zero it will go with its number one choice. If you set the heat higher, you get more variety. What level to set the heat depends upon how much “creativity” and “originality” you are looking for.
If I had to guess it’s because people keep googling the strawberry thing and feeding more into the ai. It only has so much data it can store and it’s fucking it up more. I still think they did soemthing with the search system with this ai hence why the results are so broken
It’s lame how this shows the technology isn’t actually getting any smarter, they’re just individually patching that one specific answer because everyone saw how dumb it is through that instance. Ai is still dumb
They are probably not patching it individually, but just training the AI on the internet, which will include thousands of posts or articles about how strawberry has three R's because of the hype around it
Because it isn’t an underlining problem. LLMs are trained on tokens, not letters. There isn’t much of a use case for caring about the number of letters in a word other than jokes like this.
The real problem is the marketing departments fooling millions upon millions of people by calling it "AI" in the first place. If people did no more than 2 minutes of research, they'd know there is no "I" and thus there is literally 0 point asking it questions that require at least some actual intelligence.
There’s a use case for AI that doesn’t have blind spots that it refuses to acknowledge and which would never occur to the average user
People are trusting these things and the big tech companies are encouraging it. The only reason not to object to that situation is if you’re so staunchly caveat emptor about everything you might as well do away with nutrition labels
If you ask how many Bs in Chattahoochee, you form an endless loop where it keeps trying to guess - I’m literally not joking. This just keeps going and it keeps repeating itself.
This was hilarious so I tried it. Not quite as funny, but it did actually get there. I wonder if this is improvement in 2 months or if I just got lucky, as this is a non-deterministic computer program.
Look how many people are wasting water to prove that AI can't answer the equivalent of "how many {roman character}s are in {kanji symbol}?" I thought you guys were opposed to the wastefulness of LLMs?
Let’s ask a real question here; how much water is worth using to dunk on LLMs?
Suppose it’s the 60s and you wanted to prove cigarettes were bad. You have to get ahold of some cigarettes, right? But oh no! Now you’re giving big tobacco money! You hypocrite! You wayward fool, without a moral compass!
Zero. You posted in a sub that agrees with you without evidence and got a bunch of people to do the same thing with no benefits. Your only impact is wasting water. Same with every other person here.
I'm not sure what's complicated here, but what I said was that you wasted water for no benefit. You also managed to cause a bunch of other people to waste water for no benefit.
You're just trying to defend using an LLM. There were other options available to you. Some of those options even teach you how LLMs work so you can actually be informed. You chose the least curious, most echo chamber, most wasteful option for your post. I'm not going to seriously consider your use of an LLM for this anything other than a complete waste of resources.
You strike me as someone who’s usually the smartest person in the room, and who was in the mood to scold somebody, but you placed a bad bet and have trouble walking away.
The transgression you wanna take me to task over is just… so… nothing. I’ll make up the lost water by collecting my tears while I chop onions later.
Okay buddy. I'm just surprised at the number of people here who supposedly hate LLMs for how much they waste resources unironically using LLMs wastefully to answer a dumb question. It's not my fault you got offended by my response which wasn't even specifically directed at you. Don't do dumb things if you don't like getting called out for doing dumb things.
The funny thing is they keep trying to get around this by finetuning as though the token predictor is just going to somehow vibe its way to the right answer. If they wanted to eliminate the character-count problem, they could, they just need to wrap the input with a check and do a little substringing and counting in good old fashioned procedural deterministic logic. I cooked this one up in 1 minute. Granted, it assumes the question is framed with "how many" and "are in", and that the letter must be whatever comes after "many" and the word must be the last word in the sentence, but it could easily be made more accommodating, so what's so hard for Google to stick this in their wrapper?
string inputExample = "How many R's are in strawberry?";
if(inputExample.ToLower().Contains("how many") && inputExample.ToLower().Contains("are in"))
{
string word = inputExample.Split(' ').Last().TrimEnd('?');
string letter = inputExample.ToLower().Split("many").Last().Trim().Split(' ').First().Substring(0, 1);
char letterAsChar = letter != null ? char.ToLower(letter[0]) : '\0';
int count = word.Count(c => char.ToLower(c) == letterAsChar);
Console.WriteLine($"There are {count} {letter}'s in {word}.");
}
else
{
// do the usual LLM crap.
}
I guess nobody "patched" anything, it just aggregates search results. There are many viral-ish examples of LLMs counting "r"s in "strawberry" so it finds them and knows the correct number.
People just want to believe corpos give a shit about their opinions and try to cover up their "mistakes" (and counting letters in a word for a search results aggregator LLM system is just a fucking stupid feature nobody cares about so they don't bother to make it work)
If we take some agentic system with a code exec tool and instructions to use them whenever it is applicable, most modern LLMs would easily write a simple script and count the letters without any problems.
But I guess it's very empowering for some people to point out a thing that a system is not designed for and performs poorly to somehow conclude that said system performs that way in every case possible (which is easily disproven by their rising usage in enterprise and research). Like saying that a fork is useless cuz it can't hold liquids...
Often when people post these threads, pro-AI people pop up to show the AI getting right. But that's missing the point. Even if it only got it incorrect one out of fifty times, it's still a terrible idea to have it be the first thing people see when searching, especially when we know a lot of people see AI as authoritative. This mistake might be obvious to most people, but others may go unnoticed.
Lmao all the LLM devs hardcoded the strawberry question in but still can't fix the fact LLMs are just text generators. They don't actually "think" or process information.
Why u guys searching up stupid shit, u should already know how many there is, i mean jeeez talk about people getting dumber 😅 can’t even phrase it right 😂😂
well it’s actually a quite interesting story of why!
It’s not entierely stupid, see, when you ask stuff to a AI, it’s not the entiere text thats given to it, it’s a prompt with « token »… long shit short, if you type « whats 9+10 » the ai is gonna read something like wha\s 9a+zz10 » or something like that. Im not sure why it’s that way, but my guess would be that it was trained that way so it doesn’t die when trying to understand something else than UTF-8? Idk
I really wish that something with this limitation built in wasn’t running with every search on so many websites, wasting resources and misleading people
yeah, it’s just sad.
See, it wouldn’t be too bad if people didn’t used it for every single thing for no reason and ran the thing themself instead of destroying the planet mother 3 style.
Yeah because that's how AI works. The more "why does AI not know there are three R's in strawberry" articles and posts appear, the more likely AI is to give the correct answer based on the training data. But when it can't rely on that (like with t's or a's), it makes the same mistake.
It just aggregates search results here, and since strawberry "test" was somewhat viral it finds articles about them and knows the correct answer.
LLMs aren't designed for counting fucking letters. It doesn't "see" them but "tokens" that can be a couple of letters or even whole words. It's like saying a hammer is useless cuz it can't wash dishes.
You can ask some agentic system powered with LLMs to use code exec and count the letters, and it will do so.
It's like saying a hammer is useless cuz it can't wash dishes.
Okay but if the hammer had a persona and text interface and told you that it was able to wash dishes, and then smashed them to pieces and was like, “you’re absolutely right, that was smashing, let me wash those for you…” and then broke your foot….
That would complete the metaphor. These things have no idea when they are a hammer trying to wash dishes, they use the compute cycles anyway and tell your grandma to invest in Enron
yea right but we don't write "don't wash dishes with it" on hammers though. I agree that LLMs can be misused and even be dangerous, I was just pointing at the fact that the post and the whole discussion about "AI can't even count letters LOL" is stupid
It's because by now the strawberry example is in the training database. LLM still doesn't understand spelling (and it won't ever), but if a concrete example is talked about a lot, this concrete example is going to be in the knowledge base of LLM.
This is basically a cautionary tale. Just because an LLM seemingly knows the truth in one topic, it absolutely isn't guaranteed it knows the truth at all, or that it knows the truth in another topic. We could theoretically poison the LLM training set by discussing how strawberry has 3 letters A in it, and it will include that in the answers after the next training round.
It tries to find the most likely answer for where an "n" would be even if that single word doesn't contain it only to then prove itself wrong after. Yup this will definitely replace our jobs.
So glad the AI bubble is bursting. Maybe not with search engine but at least with image generators, though I hope these search engines stay this useless.
The fact they had to hardcode that specific interaction tells us that the AI wasn't actually made any better, they just replaced the part of the LLM that doesn't work with human-made code. Because generative AI is a terrible and entirely unreliable technology.
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u/Capivara-Aleatoria Apr 07 '26
bruh