The thing is, how the tokenizing work is about as relevant to the person asking the question as name of the cat of the delivery guy who delivered the GPU that the llm runs on.
This is Hacker News, we are usually interested in how things work.
To paraphrase how this thread started - it was someone testing different boats to see whether they can simply float - and they couldn’t. And the reply was questioning the validity of testing boats whether they can simply float.
At least this is how it sounds to me when I am told that our AI overlords can’t figure out how many Rs are in the word “strawberry”.
For instance you could ask it for a JavaScript function to count any letter in any word and pass it r and strawberry and it would be far more useful.
Having edge cases doesn't mean its not useful it is neither a free assastant nor a coder who doesn't expect a paycheck. At this stage it's a tool that you can build on.
To engage with the analogy. A propeller is very useful but it doesn't replace the boat or the Captain.
"create a javascript function to count any letter in any word. Run this function for the letter "r" and the word "strawberry" and print the count"
ChatGPT-4o => Output is 3. Passed
Claude3.5 => Output is 2. Failed. Told it the count is wrong. It apologised and then fixed the issue in the code. Output is now 3. Useless if the human does not spot the error.
llama3.1-70b(local) => Output is 2. Failed.
llama3.1-70b(Groq) => Output is 2. Failed.
Gemma2-9b-lt(local) => Output is 2. Failed.
Curiously all the ones that failed had this code (or some near identical version of it)
```javascript
function countLetter(letter, word) {
// Convert both letter and word to lowercase to make the search case-insensitive
const lowerCaseWord = word.toLowerCase();
const lowerCaseLetter = letter.toLowerCase();
// Use the split() method with the letter as the separator to get an array of substrings separated by the letter
const substrings = lowerCaseWord.split(lowerCaseLetter);
// The count of the letter is the number of splits minus one (because there are n-1 spaces between n items)
return substrings.length - 1;// Test the function with "r" and "strawberry"
console.log(countLetter("r", "strawberry")); // Output: 2 ```
This prompt "please write a javascript function that takes a string and a letter and iterates over the characters in a string and counts the occurrences of the letter"
Produced a correct function given both chatGPT4o and claude3.5 for me.
Just like Dall-E is not layering coats of pain to make a watercolor... it just makes something that looks like one.
Your LLM (or you) should run the code in a code interpretor. Which ChatGPT did because it has access to tools. Your local ones don't.
Without looking at the word 'strawberry', or spelling it one letter at a time, can you rattle off how many letters are in the word off the top of your head? No? That is what we are asking the LLM to do.