Will AI one day take my job? I hope not. But in the meantime, I can do something ChatGPT can’t: I can type the word “strawberry.”
Once again, some posts are circulating on social media that reveal that powerful AI text generators can’t count—for example, how many times the letter “r” appears in the word “strawberry.” But what we often don’t realize about the immense language models (LLMs) that power products like Claude and ChatGPT is that they don’t think like we do.
In both diffusion models and LLMs, generative AI consistently makes mistakes when it comes to spelling or solving anagrams of letters. It turns out that this is because these systems do not process information by looking at the letters that make up a word—they may not even know what the letters are.
So why can’t AI spell? In today’s TechCrunch Minute, we catch up.