Why a chatbot spells 17 as "seveen": tokenization quirks exposed when reasoning is off
mmitchell_ai · x · 2026-11-04
After a viral clip showed a chatbot spelling 17 as "seveen," AI researcher Margaret Mitchell explained the mechanism: transformers do attention over tokens, not letters. Models usually work around this via "reasoning" — spelling words out letter by letter. The clip's author had turned off reasoning on a Qwen model for conversational speed and comedic effect.
The quoted post's takeaway: don't learn "AI can't spell 17" from this; comforting myths of AI incapacity mislead more people than actual model limitations.
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