GPT Cannot Count Words - Why?

[_j]

How would you count how many words are in a document yourself?

Would you stand back five feet and view it all through a foggy lens while there are others yelling numbers at you, instructions of how to paint pictures and what your friend likes for dinner? On a document where words are encoded to look like [35251, 40938, 11445]…

Or would you internally keep a count of words, “one, two, three, …” as you read them, distraction-free?

Transformer-based GPT is the former.

@vb

It is possible to prompt the ability to correctly count words because the model understands what a word is.

Here’s a post where I break down an even more deliberate prompted reasoning technique, on “count letters”, and have the AI do something you might say “can’t be done” - count the "r"s in a STORY about strawberries.

Can’t get ChatGPT to count characters correctly when rewording text

Using the above and another technique of building a positional dictionary, and structured output to mask the precursors, a dumb meme is expanded on: user: #Target questions Using your letter counting techniques, how many letter “r” are in the document? #Input document ‘’’ Aurora moved through the strawberry field, the early morning mist still clinging to the leaves. Her fingers brushed against the vibrant red berries, each one plump and dewy from the night’s cool air. The scent of the ear…

Having such an auto-prompt library of techniques is how someone could make a “reasoning” AI that consumes thousands of tokens to produce that one word count value.