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Comment by locusofself | Hacker News Reader

The other day the "wordle" was "lunar". I had "*nar", and I was struggling to remember any 5 letter words that end in "nar". I eventually got the wordle in 4 tries, but for fun I asked ChatGPT to give me a list of 5-letter words that end in the letters "nar".

It failed spectacularly at this trivial task. No matter how many different ways I asked, it consistently gave me lots of words that did not end in, or sometimes even contain the letters n,a,r , and it gave me words that were more than 5 characters.

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What's interesting is that I can ask ChatGPT to create a table with the substring of the last three letters of each word, and put it into a new column (this operation by itself is amazing in and of itself, with correct format). It still gets the substring wrong for "lunar" but gets it correct for a bunch of other words. It must think that lunar gets tokenized to "lar" for some reason. I have figured out a way to get around that, but if I tell it that last 3 letters of "lunar" are "nar" it will correct itself and regenerate my table with the correction.

So mind blowing.

That makes sense when you consider it thinks about entire words and pieces of words, not letters.

https://www.gwern.net/GPT-3#bpes for further reading. https://arxiv.org/abs/2212.10562#google is a particularly impressive recent demonstration of how serious the issue is.

Yes ChatGPT seems to not understand the makeup of words. We got it to make a game of hangman for us, and it did not go well. In the first game, the word was "table" and despite e, a being the first two guessed letters it did not credit us with a single correct guess. The second word was apple, and once again despite guessing e, a first, it told us we got none correct.

The funnier bit is I told it that we guessed both a and e, and it said it made a mistake and apologized. I also told it we guessed "p" as well (we didn't) and it apologized for that one as well. So basically, it definitely doesn't actually understand what's going on. However, some of the chats were very interesting and even productive.

I copy pasted whatever you mentioned in the comment and I made one change. I asked it to return 5-letter words that end with "nar"

Here is a list of 5-letter words that end with the letters "nar":

banar canar danar fanar granar hanar janar khanar manar panar ranar sanar tanar vanar zanar I hope this list is helpful to the user. Please let me know if there is anything else I can do to assist.

I asked just now the same question. The first word it listed was lunar. It's listed 4 other words that end in "ar" that were all 5 letters, but did not have an N

Response from YouChat:

"The five words that contain five letters and end in "nar" are canar, tunar, lunar, solemnar, and starnar."

Reply on news.ycombinator.com