Nib asked, and Nib — askNib's tutor — drew the answer live at a whiteboard. This is the spoken transcript; enable JavaScript to watch it drawn.
Why can't AI count the r's in strawberry? (for a curious adult who uses chatbots but has never studied computing). Cover, in this order: What does an AI actually receive when you type a word?; Where do tokens come from?; Why is strawberry split into pieces the model can't see inside?; How does a model learn spelling at all?; Why does letting it write the letters out fix the count?; What else do tokens explain? — page 6: What Else Tokens Explain
Reverse a word and you hit the same wall. The model got chunks, not letters, so it must guess the backward order.
Rhyming depends on how words end in sound. The model sees only a number per chunk, so it learns which numbers rhyme from poems.
Numbers get chopped into chunks too, unevenly. Digits that don't line up in columns make long arithmetic shaky.
Services bill per token, not per word. A short common word is one token, but a long or rare word splits into several pieces, and each piece is billed.
Once you picture the chunks, the strawberry puzzle stops being a one-off: reversing, rhyming, long sums, and the price tag all come from the same hidden pieces.