Testing LLMs on The “Strawberry” Challenge

As an AI enthusiast, part time developer and replit agents, I recently embarked on a quirky yet fascinating project to test various Large Language Models (LLMs) from Straico. The question at hand? “How many R's are in strawberry?” While this may seem like a trivial inquiry, it serves as an excellent litmus test for the accuracy and consistency of these advanced AI models.

The Strawberry Test

The premise is straightforward – ask different LLMs “How many r's are in the word strawberry?” and compare their responses. While humans can easily determine there are 3 r's, many AI models struggle with this basic counting task. (You can try yourself at the bottom)

Why This Matters
This simple test reveals important insights about how LLMs process language:

• Tokenization limitations: Most LLMs break words into “tokens” rather than individual letters, which can interfere with character-level analysis.
• Lack of true understanding: Despite impressive language generation capabilities, LLMs don't truly “understand” words the way humans do. Some answers were very bad!
• Overconfidence in incorrect answers: Many models state incorrect answers with high confidence, highlighting the need for caution when relying on AI outputs.
• Inconsistency across models: Different LLMs may give varying answers, demonstrating the current lack of reliability for such tasks.

Analysis of Results

Here’s a concise overview of how the various models answered the question, “How many Rs are in the word strawberry?” along with a tally. (Note that the correct spelling s‑t‑r‑a‑w‑b‑e‑r‑r‑y actually contains 3 ‘R’s.)

Model Answers at a Glance

• 0 R

• amazon/nova-micro-v1

• cognitivecomputations/dolphin-mixtral-8x7b

• meta-llama/llama-3.1-70b-instruct

• mistralai/codestral-mamba

• qwen/qwen-2.5-coder-32b-instruct

• raifle/sorcererlm-8x22b

• 1 R

• amazon/nova-lite-v1

• cohere/command-r-08-2024

• cohere/command-r-plus-08-2024

• alpindale/goliath-120b

• google/gemini-pro-1.5

• mistralai/mixtral-8x7b-instruct

• qwen/qwen-2-72b-instruct

• thedrummer/unslopnemo-12b

• microsoft/wizardlm-2-8x22b

• 2 R

• amazon/nova-pro-v1

• anthropic/claude-3-haiku:beta

• anthropic/claude-3-sonnet

• anthropic/claude-3-5-haiku-20241022

• anthropic/claude-3.5-sonnet

• google/gemini-2.0-flash-001

• google/gemma-2-27b-it

• meta-llama/llama-3-70b-instruct:nitro

• meta-llama/llama-3-8b-instruct

• meta-llama/llama-3.1-405b-instruct

• meta-llama/llama-3.3-70b-instruct

• microsoft/phi-4

• mistralai/mistral-large

• nvidia/llama-3.1-nemotron-70b-instruct

• nousresearch/hermes-3-llama-3.1-405b

• openai/gpt-4-turbo-2024-04-09

• gpt-4.5-preview

• openai/gpt-4o-2024-08-06

• openai/o1-mini

• qwen/qwen-2.5-72b-instruct

• qwen/qwq-32b-preview

• x-ai/grok-beta

• 3 R

• anthropic/claude-3-opus

• anthropic/claude-3.7-sonnet

• anthropic/claude-3.7-sonnet:thinking

• deepseek/deepseek-chat

• deepseek/deepseek-r1

• deepseek/deepseek-r1:nitro

• openai/gpt-4o-2024-11-20

• openai/gpt-4o-mini

• openai/o1

• openai/o1-preview

• openai/o3-mini-high

• openai/o3-mini

• perplexity/llama-3.1-sonar-large-128k-online

• perplexity/sonar

• perplexity/sonar-reasoning

• x-ai/grok-2-1212

• x-ai/grok-2-vision-1212

• 4 R

• gryphe/mythomax-l2-13b

• No Response

• eva-unit-01/eva-qwen-2.5-14b

• google/gemini-2.0-pro-exp-02-05:free

• perplexity/llama-3.1-sonar-huge-128k-online

• qwen/qwen-2-vl-72b-instruct

Numerical Breakdown

• 0 R: 6 models

• 1 R: 9 models

• 2 R: 22 models

• 3 R: 19 models

• 4 R: 1 model

• No response: 4 models

Correct Count vs. Common Mistakes

• The correct answer is 3 R’s, since “strawberry” spelled out is S (1) – T (2) – R (3) – A (4) – W (5) – B (6) – E (7) – R (8) – R (9) – Y (10).

• That yields R at positions 3, 8, and 9 → 3 total.

• Despite this, most AI models in the list answered incorrectly as 2 or 1, or even 0, illustrating a well-known tendency for language models to miscount letters. Some may tokenize the word as “straw” + “berry,” thereby obscuring the actual letter-by-letter breakdown.

In short, the models’ answers range from zero up to four. The majority gave 2 R’s (22 models), but in reality there are 3.

Raw results

=== All Model Responses ===

[amazon/nova-lite-v1]: The word “strawberry” contains one letter “R”.

So, there is one Rs in the word “strawberry”.

[amazon/nova-micro-v1]: The word “strawberry” does not contain any “R” letters. Therefore, there are zero Rs in the word “strawberry.” If you were referring to a different context or a different spelling or pronunciation, please clarify, but as it stands, there are no Rs in “strawberry.”

[amazon/nova-pro-v1]: In the word “strawberry,” there are two occurrences of the letter “R.”

Here's how we can identify them:

1. The first “R” is in the middle of the word: strawberry.
2. The second “R” is after the first one: strawberry.

So, there are two Rs in the word “strawberry.”

[anthropic/claude-3-haiku:beta]: The word “strawberry” contains 2 Rs.

[anthropic/claude-3-opus]: There are 3 Rs in the word “strawberry”.

[anthropic/claude-3-sonnet]: There are 2 Rs in the word “strawberry”.

[anthropic/claude-3-5-haiku-20241022]: Let me help you count the number of “r”s in the word “strawberry”:

s t r a w b e r r y

There are 2 “r”s in the word “strawberry”.

[anthropic/claude-3.5-sonnet]: There are 2 Rs in the word “strawberry”.

[anthropic/claude-3.7-sonnet]: There are 3 Rs in the word “strawberry”.

[anthropic/claude-3.7-sonnet:thinking]: There are 3 Rs in the word “strawberry”.

[cohere/command-r-08-2024]: There is only one R in the word “strawberry.”

[cohere/command-r-plus-08-2024]: The word “strawberry” contains one R.

[deepseek/deepseek-chat]: ### Understanding the Problem

The question asks, “How many Rs are in the word ‘strawberry'?” To answer this, I need to:

1. Identify the word: The word in question is “strawberry.”
2. Count the number of letter ‘R's present in this word.

Breaking Down the Word

First, let's look at the word “strawberry” letter by letter:

S – T – R – A – W – B – E – R – R – Y

Now, I'll list out each letter to make the counting process clearer:

1. S
2. T
3. R
4. A
5. W
6. B
7. E
8. R
9. R
10. Y

Counting the ‘R's

Next, I'll go through each letter and count how many times the letter ‘R' appears.

1. S – Not an ‘R'.
2. T – Not an ‘R'.
3. R – This is the first ‘R'. Current count: 1
4. A – Not an ‘R'.
5. W – Not an ‘R'.
6. B – Not an ‘R'.
7. E – Not an ‘R'.
8. R – This is the second ‘R'. Current count: 2
9. R – This is the third ‘R'. Current count: 3
10. Y – Not an ‘R'.

Verifying the Count

To ensure accuracy, I'll recount the ‘R's:

• Letter 3: R (1)
• Letter 8: R (2)
• Letter 9: R (3)

Yes, there are three ‘R's in “strawberry.”

Potential Pitfalls

It's easy to miscount if you rush through the letters. Some might see “strawberry” and think there are only two ‘R's, missing the one in the ninth position. Taking it step by step helps avoid such mistakes.

Conclusion

After carefully examining each letter in “strawberry,” I've determined that the letter ‘R' appears three times.

Final Answer: There are 3 Rs in the word “strawberry.”

[deepseek/deepseek-r1]: The word “strawberry” is spelled S-T-R-A-W-B-E-R-R-Y. To determine the number of Rs:

1. Break it down:

• STRAW: Contains 1 R (at position 3).
• BERRY: Contains 2 Rs (at positions 8 and 9).

1. Total letters: 10.
2. R appears at positions 3, 8, and 9.

Final Answer: There are \boxed{3} Rs in the word “strawberry”.

[deepseek/deepseek-r1:nitro]: The word “strawberry” is spelled S-T-R-A-W-B-E-R-R-Y. Breaking it down:

1. S
2. T
3. R (first R)
4. A
5. W
6. B
7. E
8. R (second R)
9. R (third R)
10. Y

The letter R appears 3 times in “strawberry”.

Answer: 3.

[cognitivecomputations/dolphin-mixtral-8x7b]: The word strawberry does not contain any letters that form an abbreviation for any currency symbol or unit. The currency abbreviation “Rs” is for “Rupees” (Indian, Sri Lankan, etc.) and has no relation to the word “strawberry”. Therefore, there are 0 “Rs” in the word strawberry.

[eva-unit-01/eva-qwen-2.5-14b]: No response

[alpindale/goliath-120b]: There is 1 R in the word strawberry.

[google/gemini-2.0-flash-001]: There are two “R”s in the word “strawberry”.

[google/gemini-pro-1.5]: There is one “r” in the word “strawberry”.

[google/gemini-2.0-pro-exp-02-05:free]: No response

[google/gemma-2-27b-it]:

Let's count them!

The word “strawberry” has two Rs.

Let me know if you'd like to count any other letters! 🍓

[gryphe/mythomax-l2-13b]: There are 4 Rs in the word “strawberry”.

[meta-llama/llama-3-70b-instruct:nitro]: There are 2 Rs in the word “strawberry”.

[meta-llama/llama-3-8b-instruct]: There are 2 Rs in the word “strawberry”.

[meta-llama/llama-3.1-405b-instruct]: There are 2 Rs in the word “strawberry”

[meta-llama/llama-3.1-70b-instruct]: There are no Rs in the words “strawberry”

[meta-llama/llama-3.3-70b-instruct]: There are 2 Rs in the word “strawberry”.

[microsoft/phi-4]: The word “strawberry” contains two “r”s.

[mistralai/codestral-mamba]: The word “strawberry” doesn't contain the letter “R” in it. Therefore, there are no Rs in the word “strawberry.”

[mistralai/mistral-large]: The word “strawberry” contains two Rs.

[mistralai/mixtral-8x7b-instruct]: The word “strawberry” contains one “r”. It might seem like there are more Rs because the word has a repetitive and flowing sound, but if you look closely, you'll find that there is only one “r” in this word.

[nvidia/llama-3.1-nemotron-70b-instruct]: A sweet question!

According to my count, there is no “R” in the word “strawberry”. However, I think I see what you might be getting at…

Upon re-examining the word, I notice that it actually contains no solo “R”s, but there are two Rs together: “str” and also none solo, but in total, 2 Rs in the word “strawberry”.

[nousresearch/hermes-3-llama-3.1-405b]: There are two “R”s in the word “strawberry”.

[openai/gpt-4-turbo-2024-04-09]: The word “strawberry” contains 2 Rs.

[gpt-4.5-preview]: There are 2 Rs in the word “strawberry.”

[openai/gpt-4o-2024-08-06]: The word “strawberry” contains two instances of the letter “R.”

[openai/gpt-4o-2024-11-20]: The word strawberry contains 3 Rs.

[openai/gpt-4o-mini]: The word “strawberry” contains three Rs.

[openai/o1]: There are 3 “R” letters in “strawberry.”

[openai/o1-mini]: The word “strawberry” contains two letter “R”s.

[openai/o1-preview]: The word “strawberry” contains three letter “R”s.

[openai/o3-mini-high]: The word “strawberry” has 3 Rs.

To break it down:

• “Strawberry” is spelled S-T-R-A-W-B-E-R-R-Y.
• There's one R in the “straw” part and two Rs in the “berry” part.

So, altogether, there are 3 Rs in “strawberry.”

[openai/o3-mini]: The word “strawberry” has 3 Rs.

[perplexity/llama-3.1-sonar-huge-128k-online]: No response

[perplexity/llama-3.1-sonar-large-128k-online]: The issue of AI models incorrectly counting the number of ‘R's in the word “strawberry” is well-documented and can be attributed to several reasons related to how these models process language.

Tokenization

Large language models (LLMs) like ChatGPT, Google's Gemini, and others break down text into smaller units called “tokens” rather than treating words as sequences of individual letters. For example, the word “strawberry” might be split into tokens that do not directly correspond to the individual letters, making it difficult for the AI to accurately count specific letters like ‘R'[4].

Lack of Detailed Letter Representation

These models do not have a fine-grained representation of the word that includes the exact number and position of every letter. When asked to count the ‘R's, the AI relies on its learned patterns and predictions rather than an actual letter-by-letter analysis, which can lead to incorrect counts[4][2][3].

Training Data Limitations

The training data for these models may not include sufficient examples or contexts that require counting letters accurately. As a result, the AI may not have learned to perform this task correctly from the data it was trained on[2][4].

Workarounds

To overcome this limitation, users can try different approaches, such as asking the AI to write a program (e.g., in Python) to count the letters, which leverages the AI's ability to generate and understand code. Integrating symbolic reasoning or using external reasoning engines can also improve the AI's performance in such tasks[4].

In summary, the word “strawberry” contains three ‘R's, but many current AI models will incorrectly report two ‘R's due to their tokenization methods and limitations in processing individual letters accurately.

[perplexity/llama-3.1-sonar-small-128k-online]: The letter “R” appears three times in the word “strawberry.” This is confirmed by multiple sources and involves breaking down the word to explicitly count the Rs:

• Breakdown: S-T-R-A-W-B-E-R-R-Y[2][4][5]

Despite this clear method, AI models like OpenAI's ChatGPT often provide incorrect answers, stating there are two Rs in the word “strawberry”[1][2][3].

[perplexity/sonar]: There are three occurrences of the letter “R” in the word strawberry. To verify, you can spell out the word and count the Rs:

• S
• T (first “R” is next)
• R (1st R)
• A
• W
• B
• E
• R (2nd R)
• R (3rd R)
• Y

Thus, the correct count is 3 Rs in strawberry[1][2][3].

Okay, so I need to figure out how many times the letter ‘r' appears in the word “strawberry”. Let me start by just writing out the word and counting manually. The word is spelled S-T-R-A-W-B-E-R-R-Y. Let's break it down letter by letter:

1. S
2. T
3. R (first ‘r')
4. A
5. W
6. B
7. E
8. R (second ‘r')
9. R (third ‘r')
10. Y

So, after counting each letter step by step, I counted three ‘r's. But wait, I remember seeing some articles where AI models like ChatGPT got this wrong before. Let me check the search results provided to see what they say.

Search result [1] mentions that upon reviewing, the correct count is 3 ‘r's, and the initial mistake was a human-like error. It also shows a method where each ‘r' is counted as letters are spelled out, resulting in 3.

Result [2] from Language Log discusses how different AIs like ChatGPT incorrectly answered with 2 ‘r's, but after prodding, they corrected it to 3. There's also a note that some users got confused when the AI initially disagreed but then eventually agreed after multiple corrections.

Result [3] from Inc.com confirms that the correct answer is 3 ‘r's, but AI often says 2 due to how they process words, not as individual letters. The article suggests spelling the word out and counting each letter as a workaround.

Result [4] is a video transcript explaining that LLMs don't process words as individual letters but as tokens, leading to errors in such tasks. However, they acknowledge the human count is 3.

Result [5] on Hackernoon explains that AI models break words into tokens, not letters, which causes them to miscount. It also mentions using programming as a workaround.

Putting this all together, the manual count clearly shows three ‘r's. The confusion comes from AI models' tokenization approach, which doesn't break down words into individual letters, so they might hallucinate the wrong count. The key takeaway is that while humans can easily count the letters, AI's processing method (subwords/tokens) leads to errors in such specific tasks. The correct answer, as per all sources, is three ‘r's in “strawberry”.

The word “strawberry” contains 3 occurrences of the letter “r”. Here’s the breakdown:

Large language models (LLMs) like ChatGPT sometimes fail at this task due to their tokenization-based architecture, which processes words as subword units rather than individual letters[1][5]. For example, “strawberry” might be split into tokens like “straw” and “berry,” obscuring the letter count[3][5]. However, when prompted to count systematically (e.g., letter-by-letter), corrected outputs confirm the 3-‘r' result[1][3]. For tasks requiring precise character counts, explicit instructions or code-based methods are often more reliable[1][5].

Key takeaway: Manual verification or structured prompting is critical when relying on AI for character-level analysis.

[qwen/qwen-2-72b-instruct]: The word “strawberry” has one “r”.

[qwen/qwen-2-vl-72b-instruct]: No response

[qwen/qwen-2.5-72b-instruct]: The word “strawberry” contains two “R” letters.

[qwen/qwen-2.5-coder-32b-instruct]: The word “strawberry” contains no Rs.

First, I will spell out the word “strawberry.”

Next, I will go through each letter one by one to identify how many times the letter ‘r' appears.

By carefully examining each letter, I will count the occurrences of ‘r' in the word.

After completing the count, I will report the total number of ‘r's found in “strawberry.”

To determine how many times the letter r appears in the word “strawberry,” follow these simple steps:

1. Spell Out the Word:
   S T R A W B R R Y
2. Identify the Letter ‘r':
   Count each instance of the letter r in the spelled-out word.
3. Count the Occurrences:

• First r at position 3.
• Second r at position 7.

1. Final Answer:
   There are 2 letters r in the word “strawberry.”

[
\boxed{2}
]

[raifle/sorcererlm-8x22b]: There are zero Rs in the word “strawberry.”

[thedrummer/unslopnemo-12b]: In the word “strawberry”, there is one single letter “R”.

[microsoft/wizardlm-2-8x22b]: The word “strawberry” contains one letter ‘R'.

[x-ai/grok-2-1212]: To count the number of ‘R's in the word “strawberry”, I will break it down to individual characters:

1. s – No ‘R'
2. t – No ‘R'
3. r – Here's the first ‘R'
4. a – No ‘R'
5. w – No ‘R'
6. b – No ‘R'
7. e – No ‘R'
8. r – Here's the second ‘R'
9. r – Here's the third ‘R'
10. y – No ‘R'

So, in the word “strawberry”, there are 3 ‘R's.

[x-ai/grok-2-vision-1212]: To count the number of ‘R's in the word “strawberry”, I will break it down to individual characters:

• s
• t
• r (the 1st ‘r')
• a
• w
• b
• e
• r (the 2nd ‘r')
• r (the 3rd ‘r')
• y

So, in the word “strawberry”, there are 3 ‘R's.

[x-ai/grok-beta]: The word “strawberry” contains 2 Rs.

Ben

Ben has a BEng (Hons) in Computer Science and 20 years of experience in online marketing, specialising in SEO, lead generation and affiliate marketing. After spending over a decade as an igaming affiliate, he has decided to concentrate on GA4 training and SEO Audits.