It is. Strawberry is one token in many tokenziers. The model doesn't have a concept that there are letters there.
Very large language models also “know” how to spell the word associated with the strawberry token, which you can test by asking them to spell the word one letter at a time. If you ask the model to spell the word and count the R’s while it goes, it can do the task. So the failure to do it when asked directly (how many r’s are in strawberry) is pointing to a real weakness in reasoning, where one forward pass of the transformer is not sufficient to retrieve the spelling and also count the R’s.
LOL. I would fail your test, because "fraise" only has one R, and you're expecting me to reply "3".
[1] Suggestion from chatgpt3.5 for new fruit name.
There are tokens for individual letters, but the model is not trained on text written with individual tokens per letter, it is trained on text that has been converted into as few tokens as possible. Just like you would get very confused if someone started spelling out entire sentences as they spoke to you, expecting you to reconstruct the words from the individual spoken letters, these LLMs also would perform terribly if you tried to send them individual tokens per letter of input (instead of the current tokenizer scheme that they were trained on).
Even though you might write a message to an LLM, it is better to think of that as speaking to the LLM. The LLM is effectively hearing words, not reading letters.