But my point was that ChatGPT, like any tokenized LLM, doesn't even have the concept of letters. The prompt "how many e's in this sentence" is rendered as the tokens [4919, 867, 304, 338, 287, 428, 6827]. There just isn't a pathway for it to consider the letters that make up those tokens.

I'm a little surprised it did that well on your prompt, which is rendered as [10919, 2456, 886, 287, 556, 72]. The interesting thing here is that 556 = " ag" (with leading space) and 72 = "i". So I'm not sure how got to those words. "Wagagi" is tokens [54, 363, 18013], so somehow it is seeing that token 18013 is what you get when you combine 556 and 72? That seems really weird.

I'd love clarification from someone deeper into LLMs and tokenization.