LLMs see tokens, not words spelled out with letters.
Imagine verbally asking someone who has never seen written text the same question: unless they memorized the answer for the specific word you're asking about, they'd have to guess.
Imagine verbally asking someone who has never seen written text the same question: unless they memorized the answer for the specific word you're asking about, they'd have to guess.
We don't know what was going on inside the closed source GPT models, but this paper investigated on some of the open-weight models and found it's not due to tokenization: https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.00778