Comment by andyjohnson0
5 months ago
> With LLMs being unable to count how many Bs are in blueberry, they clearly don't have any world model whatsoever.
Is this a real defect, or some historical thing?
I just asked GPT-5:
How many "B"s in "blueberry"?
and it replied:
There are 2 — the letter b appears twice in "blueberry".
I also asked it how many Rs in Carrot, and how many Ps in Pineapple, amd it answered both questions correctly too.
It’s a historical thing that people still falsely claim is true, bizarrely without trying it on the latest models. As you found, leading LLMs don’t have a problem with it anymore.
The question is, did these LLMs figured it out by themselves or has someone programmed a specific coroutine to address this „issue“, to make it look smarter than it is?
On a trillion dollar budget, you could just crawl the web for AI tests people came up with and solve them manually. We know it‘s a massively curated game. With that kind of money you can do a lot of things. You could feed every human on earth countless blueberries for starters.
Calling an algorithm to count letters in a word isn’t exactly worth the hype tho is it?
The point is, we tend to find new ways these LLMs can’t figure out the most basic shit about the world. Horses can count. Counting is in everything. If you read every text ever written and still can’t grasp counting you simply are not that smart.
Depends how you define historical. If by historical you mean more than two days ago then, yeah, it's ancient history.
Some LLMs do better than others, but this still sometimes trips up even "frontier" non-reasoning models. People were showing this on this very forum with GPT-5 in the past couple days.
It is not historical:
https://kieranhealy.org/blog/archives/2025/08/07/blueberry-h...
Perhaps they have a hot fix that special cases HN complaints?
They clearly RLHF out the embarrassing cases and make cheating on benchmarks into a sport.
I wouldn't be surprised if some models get set up to identify that type of question and run the word through string processing function.
3 replies →
It was discussed and reproduced on GPT-5 on HN couple of days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44832908
Sibling poster is probably mistakenly thinking of the strawberry issue from 2024 on older LLM models.
Shouldn't the correct answer be that there is not a "B" in "blueberry"?
No, why?
It depend on context. English is often not very precise and relies on implied context clues. And that's good. It makes communication more efficient in general.
To spell it out: in this case I suspect you are talking about English letter case? Most people don't care about case when they ask these questions, especially in an informal question.