IDK. Probably the model's doing some mental gymnastics to figure that out. I was surprised they haven't taught it to count yet. It's a well-known limitation.
But if tokenization makes them not be able to "see" the letters at all, then no amount of mental gymnastics can save you.
I'm aware of the limitation, i'm annoyingly using socratic dialogue to convince you that it is possible to count letters if the model were sufficiently smart.
