The failure of large language models to comprehend the concepts of letters and syllables indicates a more significant truth we often forget: These things don't have brains. They do not think like we do. They are not human, nor even particularly humanlike. GPT-4o and Claude, two formidable AI products, claim that the letter ""r"" appears twice in the word ""strawberry."" ""LLMs are based on this transformer architecture, which notably does not read text. What happens when you input a prompt is that it's translated into an encoding,"" said Matthew Guzdial, AI researcher.