Here’s some even better examples: Asking ChatGPT to spell things backwards. Reversing strings is trivial for a character-level transformer (a model thouands of times smaller than GPT-4o could do this perfectly), but ChatGPT can’t reverse ‘riedenheit’, or ‘umpulan’, or ′ milioane’.
My theory here is that there are lots of spelling examples in the training data, so ChatGPT mostly memorizes how to spell, but there’s very few reversals in the training data, so ChatGPT can’t reverse any uncommon tokens.
Here’s some even better examples: Asking ChatGPT to spell things backwards. Reversing strings is trivial for a character-level transformer (a model thouands of times smaller than GPT-4o could do this perfectly), but ChatGPT can’t reverse ‘riedenheit’, or ‘umpulan’, or ′ milioane’.
My theory here is that there are lots of spelling examples in the training data, so ChatGPT mostly memorizes how to spell, but there’s very few reversals in the training data, so ChatGPT can’t reverse any uncommon tokens.
EDIT: Asking for every other character in a token is similarly hard.