An LLM doesn't even see individual letters at all, because they get encoded into tokens before they are passed as input to the model. It doesn't make much sense to require reasoning with things that aren't even in the input as a requisite for intelligence.

That would be like an alien race that could see in an extra dimension, or see the non-visible light spectrum, presenting us with problems that we cannot even see and saying that we don't have AGI when we fail to solve them.