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ChatGPT’s next big evolution lies in its ability to solve the ‘strawberry’ problem
Aug 30, 2024 · 5 min readUpdated Jul 7, 2026
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If you ask ChatGPT how many “r”s are in the word “strawberry,” it famously fails miserably:
This occurs for two reasons. The first is that ChatGPT doesn’t actually see the word “strawberry.” Instead, it translates “strawberry” into an AI-readable language that represents words, not with letters, but with long strings of numbers. There’s no way for ChatGPT to count the number of letters in “strawberry.” It doesn’t see letters because of the way it’s built.Become a paid subscriber to Every to unlock the rest of this piece and read about:
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