[mckirk]

The problem is that these models do not have any working memory they could use to carry out such tasks, which are on a meta-level when seen from a language perspective. They can only go with their 'gut instinct' for selecting the next word, they can't 'consider and ponder the problem internally' first.

[sp332]

The problem is that the input is tokenized before the model gets it as input. It does not see the individual letters "t" + "o". It gets one single token, #1462. The word "toe" is another single token, #44579. Maybe over time it could learn from context that inputs that start with #44579 also satisfy the constraint of starting with #1462, but that's a lot of work and it's not going to happen for all combinations of letters.

[jameslevy]

Perhaps prompting the model to first describe its approach to answering the question. This type of chain-of-thought technique can yield better results.