why does chatgpt keep miscounting the letters in strawberry?

ask it to count using code. it runs a tiny script, so it's counting real characters and gets it right.

It doesn't see letters. text gets chopped into tokens, chunks of a few characters, so "strawberry" might be two or three pieces and it never looks at the individual r's. the newer models that think before answering mostly get it right now, or ask it to spell the word out letter by letter first and then count.