It can't count because it doesn't know what counting is. Otherwise it would be able to count like a computer can. After ingesting all the literature in the world, why can't it count yet?
It can, just not very well. Often the issue is people have it count letters and words but those aren’t the abstractions or deals with. It would be like if I told you to pick up the ball primarily reflecting 450nm light and called you colorblind if you couldn’t do it.
GPT is built on a computer. It is not a computer itself. I am made of cells, but I am not able to perform mitosis.
It’s also very capable of offloading counting tasks, since computers are so good at that. Just suggest it format things in code and evaluate it.
Here’s an example of it counting. I’m pretty confident it’s never seen this exact problem before.
How many fruits are in this list? banana, hammer, wrench, watermelon, screwdriver, pineapple, peach
There are 4 fruits in the list you provided: banana, watermelon, pineapple, and peach. The other items are tools, not fruits.
It's not counting, it's just outputting something that is likely to sound right. The reason it can't count is that it doesn't know that it should run a counting algorithm when you ask it to count, or what a counting algorithm is. There is no reason why an AI should not be able to run an algorithm. Coming up with appropriate algorithms and running them is one definition of AIs. This is not an AI. It is an algorithm itself but it cannot create or run algorithms, though it can output things that look like them. The "algorithms" it outputs are not even wrong, correctness and truth is orthogonal to it's output and without that you don't have real intelligence.