Comment by jameshart

I suspect character counting - counting small numbers in general in fact - is something that multimodal models will gradually learn through their visual capabilities. We have generative systems that are capable of generating an image of the word ‘strawberry’, and of counting how many strawberries are visible in an image; seems likely it’s possible for an LLM to ‘imagine’ what the word strawberry looks like and count the ‘Rs’ it can ‘see’.