> I should also point out that your tone is aggressive, so it makes me think you're not interested in learning
Why do you think that? Aggressiveness is the best way to get responses, people don't like it but it makes people respond to you.
And for that matter I have a pretty good understanding about this topic, it is kind of annoying when people try to school you then. The "it gets tokenized data" is just a cop out response by people who don't understand the problem.
> It cannot understand these properties of words without them being in the training data because it does not operate on words, it operates on tokens
But those properties are in the training data. We know the LLM can answer these sort of questions when asked directly for simpler cases. But when asked to do something that requires it to draw from many different parts it fails. It didn't fail due to the data not being there, it failed due to not understanding that it should use that data.
> This makes it much more difficult to learn how to reason about particular data that appears _inside the token_, because _it does not ever receive that information_
Right, the structure of LLM makes these sort of questions harder for it. But they aren't impossible or unfair, nothing prevents an LLM model from solving this sort of question. The main reason it fails is that it tries to write it like a human would, as it isn't trained to solve problems it is trained to mimic humans, it is too dumb to figure out ways to solve it on its own.
And to show you I understand how these models works, the most efficient way to solve this question would be to solve it like a human. If it wrote out the steps "try next word as 'Blah'" and then verify those words one at a time, likely it would succeed. And since we know LLMs work like that we could try to make it output the results in that way, and that would improve performance. However, a smart agent would understand that its answer was wrong in that case by itself, and change its answering style on its own to fit the problem. But it can't think like that, it just tries to write it like answers it has seen, it doesn't do any verification since the answers it saw didn't verify, it doesn't spell things out here since the answers it saw didn't spell things out etc.