I think these models struggle with this because they don’t process text as individual characters, but rather as tokens that often contain parts of a word. So the model never sees the actual characters within a token, and can only infer the contents of a token from the training data itself if the training data contains more information about it. It can get it right, but this depends on how much it can infer from training data and context. It’s probably a bit like trying to infer what an English word sounds like when you’ve only heard 10% of the dictionary spoken aloud and knowing what it sounds like isn’t actually that important to you.
More info can be found here: https://platform.openai.com/tokenizer
Ok, so, tokenization of the words is why I get that I have seen tech nerds get so excited about a system that allows for being able to come up with synonyms for words that were auto-generated that have a basic ability to sometimes be correct by looking at the words before and after it…
But it’s such a shitty way to look up synonyms! Using the words on either side doesn’t mean you found a synonym just that you found another word that might work and it still has to use the full horsepower of ridiculously overpowered system.
Or you could have a lookup table that just reads the frickin word and has alternate synonyms predefined and it was able to run in word 97.
It’s ridiculous that we think this is better in any meaningful way instead of just wasteful development.
