[mirekrusin]

The argument is that letter level information is something llms don't have a chance to see.

It's a bit like asking human to read text and guess gender or emotional state of the author who wrote it. You just don't have this information.

Similarly you could ask why ":) is smiling and :D is happy" where the question will be seen as "[50372, 382, 62529, 326, 712, 35, 382, 7150]" - encoding looses this information, it's only visible in image rendering of this text.

[Terr_]

The point isn't that they fail at the task.

The point is that if the model were really "reasoning", it would fail differently. Instead, what happens is consistent with it BSing on a textual level.