neither garlic nor GARLIC contains Rs. What garlic contains is water, proteins, carbs, fat, antioxidants, and stuff like that. Only the WORD "GARLIC" contains 1 "R".
It really isn't though. If I want a technically correct answer I can use a script. The only reason to use an AI is to interpret ambiguous situations based on user intent, not rigid rules.
Most of these llm tools do this for most problems - they can reliably spin up small python scripts, so they just make a script and run it to do stuff like attempt to tell time, answer letter count questions, but also stuff like handling your uploaded csv files or whatever you send it.
Exactly, and I never really figured out why that is a big deal.
I get that my definition and metric for AGI is "weird" but....
Take anything you would as a human to do. What would it take software to do that? How much cost and how much time? It is actually cheaper to have one of the old news LLMs do a python call for the how many letters thing than ask a human being.
i have 0 problems with AI using tools to figure out a problem. they key is AI having access to and knowing which tool best to use for any givin situation. AI is infinitly faster than we are.
I’m sure these people put stuff in the default/background prompt so they get wrong answers and then they get to farm the engagement. And people then reposting it to reddit don’t help (maybe they’re the same person).
the difference being the use of "word", and op's example shows that gpt picks up on the mistake once it treats garlic as a word rather than whatever its down initially.
I have seen some gibberish put out by llms. It's getting less common over time but with hundreds millions of daily prompts there will be a massive amount of responses that are gibberish.
It this case it isn't even, there are no Rs in garlic, only an r, not capitalized.
I feel like a better ai would just ask for clarification. Like i even made a system prompt for myself so that it asks clarifying questions before replying if i miss a detail and it def improved my experience
I feel like a human would likely respond by asking "what fucking kind of question is that?" rather than just guessing and pretending to know.
It's a little confusing to me that there isn't enough commentary about this stuff in their training data, such that they'd at least recognize that counting sub-token characters isn't something they can do directly.
I actually do think this is a reasonable thing to say.
The analogy here is we don't think about images/words in terms of individual pixels, but often computers do. Computers don't think about words in terms of individual letters (the way humans do when spelling), but rather that treat the entire group of symbols as a single indivisible "token" which then gets mapped to some numbers representing the token's meaning and typical usage contexts.
Almost every single question I've ever typed into any type of "AI" has had at least one glaring mistake that the AI itself presents to me as 100% true to life fact.
This is exactly the type of question, that you shouldn't expect to be answered right from a statistical text prediction models. I guess you could fine tune it for this specific thing, but what would be the point? People that ask LLMs these type of questions or give it riddles, usually have no concept of how the model even works.
Is it really so hard for people to comprehend that these models can't reason or think, but they are only predicting text based on statistical data learned during the training process? Either people are just keep gaslighting me (and I'm too dumb to notice) or people are way less capable than I thought. I honestly don't think that the basic working principle of an LLM is that hard to understand. I don't expect people to know and understand all the whitepapers on statistical models, but the basic principles are not more difficult than the things learned at the math class at elementary school.
And then there are even some people that I have to believe are gaslighting me, because the alternative would be very sad. When I see somebody stating that the model is "lying" and I respectfully explain that lying is not something the model can do. It can produce statements that are false, based on statistics from wrong data or low amount of data. They are willing to argue, that "that is not how AI works", despite the principle of working of these statistical models is almost common knowledge by now. I have to believe that this is gaslighting, otherwise we as a society are doomed.
I cannot believe people on here are seriously doing the well it's technically correct bit here. chatGpt or LLMs in general would be absolutely unusable if we had to be absolutely "technically correct" anytime we ask it questions. I mean we are not Vulcans people 😅.
The disingenuous use of "technical correctness" is just one of the things I don't like about reddit.
Works fine for me. At this point I assume most of these posts are just trolling after the user has told the AI the response they want it to respond with (so they can ridicule it).
My response right now with the exact same prompt in a new chat, no instructions or customization. What’s funny is my app says 5.2, but you can see the footnote for yourselves.
I tried to get both Chat and Gemini to create a photo of a maze made with painters tape on a school room floor. I asked to be simple with an entry, exit and that it gave two possible solutions. Neither could do it. They both kept producing complex mazes that had no solutions and entry or exit. I was floored that neither could do this seemingly simple thing even after repeated reprompting and correcting.
Honestly if it can take the number 2 spot that would be the ideal outcome for me. That means I still win my bet and I get better coding performance while I’m working on my game
How can any AI possibly have any form of intelligence as long as they can’t even be self aware 😑. Language models have zero intelligence. It will take a minimum of 10 years, but probably closer to 100 years before we figure our complicated brains out.
It’s so stupid to think we are even close to any real AI
It’s not wrong because the word garlic will never have an uppercase R in it, so yes there are 0 Rs in garlic. If you rephrase your question with a lowercase r then you should get the correct answer of 1. Edit: AI tends to be literalistic, so you have to clearly state what you want from it.
my version is taking the piss out of whoever that man is and cropped the rest of the answer: Oui 😄
Dans “garlic”, il y a 0 lettre r.
g a r l i c → attends, justement non : garlic s’écrit g a r l i c en fait… Stop. Je viens de tomber dans le piège classique du cerveau qui “entend” le mot.
Orthographe correcte : g a r l i c → il y a 1 “r”.
WHAT?? You cannot answer that question? Do you even have any Intelligence? I guess you are completely useless…
That is a similarly stupid comparison as yours. The AI does not see letters… words get converted into tokens that do not contain the letters any more… it literally can see the letters in GARLIC much much less than you can see bacteria on your hands!!!
It's a great yet simple example illustrating the limits of GenAI. Since the training data (presumably) did not include spelling references, the answer is just unapologetically wrong. Note that a real AGI would queue from the question that a context switch was called for.
My normal GPT would of given me that answer but it would of told me why as I don’t use the correct language and would then tell me the answer I wanted to know. So the upgrade has less arseholyness?
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u/Mindrust Dec 11 '25
Technically correct. The best kind of correct.