Rob Gough

“AI can’t count the e’s in seventeen” keeps doing the rounds as proof AI is dumb.

All it proves is that most people don’t know how they work.

A model doesn’t read letters. Text is chopped into tokens, chunks that are often whole words, and each token becomes a vector: a list of numbers placing it in a space where similar meanings sit close together.

So the model knows “seventeen” belongs with “sixteen” and “eighteen”. It just doesn’t get a look at the letters inside.

Ask it to count e’s and you’re testing the one thing it can barely see.

Give the same model a way to run code and it’ll knock up a three-line script and get it right every time.

If all you’ve tried is a chat box with limited tools, you’ve only seen the model in a cage.

No character means as much to me as Jean-Luc Picard. I realised quite young that religion didn’t work for me, and Picard became my moral compass. Thank you, Sir Patrick, for bringing him to life for me and so many others, and for always respecting what he meant to us.

Worth it for the glowing apple icon. So glad that's back! Shame there's no FaceID, 5G, or an all-around folding display ("tablet mode"). That said, the current design is pretty great, looks like it's been trimmed a bit but otherwise largely the same. That's a good thing. #MacBookPro #Apple