“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.