This is due to the tokenization scheme. These LLMs can’t see individual characters, they see chunks of characters that are glued together to form tokens.

It’s impressive that they understand individual-character-level questions as well as they do.

I asked it "How do you reverse a string?"

> To reverse a string, I use the built-in "reverse" function in Python. It takes a string as input and returns the string with all the characters in reverse order. For example, the input string "hello" would become "lohel" when reversed.

We're not quite there yet.

That's like testing a human by asking him or her to calculate large numbers.

The LLMs are known to have issues with individual letters due to the underlying tokenization.