Comment by Al-Khwarizmi

I have just tried and it indeed does get it right quite often, but if the word is rare (or made up) and the position is not one of the first, it often fails. And GPT-4 too.

I suppose if it can sort of do it is because of indirect deductions from training data.

I.e. maybe things like "the third letter of the word dog is d", or "the word d is composed of the letters d, o, g" are in the training data; and from there it can answer questions not only about "dog", but probably about words that have "dog" as their first subtoken.

Actually it's quite impressive that it can sort of do it taking into account that, as I mention, characters are just outright not in the input. It's ironic that people often use these things as an example of how "dumb" the system is when it's actually amazing that it can sometimes work around that limitation.