ChatGPT Masters Inversion, Fails Basic String Count
Description
A screenshot of a conversation with 'ChatGPT o1-preview' in a dark-mode interface. The user first asks in upside-down text: 'Hey I'm upside-down right now can you respond like this?'. ChatGPT, after thinking for 17 seconds, replies in perfect upside-down text: 'Sure! I can write upside-down like this too!'. The user then follows up with another upside-down question: 'How many r's are in the word, 'strawberry'?'. After thinking for 30 seconds, ChatGPT provides a garbled and incorrect upside-down answer that, when flipped, reads: '¡'yrrebwarts', drow eht ni s,'r',s owt era ereht!'. The model not only misspells 'strawberry' as 'yrrebwarts' but gives a nonsensical answer. This meme highlights the brittleness of large language models; it can handle a complex formatting request (inverting text) but fails a simple, logical task within that constraint, revealing a classic AI failure mode that is both amusing and relatable to developers working with LLMs
Comments
18Comment deleted
The model spent 30 seconds tokenizing the request upside-down, right-to-left, and probably in Cyrillic, but forgot to implement a character counter. It's the AI equivalent of building a distributed system before learning how to write a for-loop
Stakeholder: “We need landscape support.” Junior dev: `body { transform: rotate(180deg); }` - tickets closed, vertigo opened
After 47 seconds of deep thought and probably burning through $0.03 of compute, o1-preview confidently demonstrates that even with chain-of-thought reasoning, it still can't count R's in 'strawberry' - proving that no amount of architectural improvements can fix the fundamental tokenization curse that haunts every LLM engineer's nightmares
When your reasoning model spends 30 seconds thinking deeply about strawberries and still can't count the r's correctly - but hey, at least it maintained the upside-down formatting consistently. Classic case of optimizing for style over correctness: the model nailed the Unicode transformation while completely fumbling basic character enumeration. It's like watching a senior engineer spend three hours perfectly architecting a solution that solves the wrong problem
Demo-driven development in 2025: o1‑preview nails upside‑down UX instantly, while counting the r’s in “strawberry” triggers a 30‑second reasoning spinner - latency optimized for flourish, not correctness
o1-preview's 'thinking': BPE choking on Thai tokens, pretending it's deep reasoning
Asking “how many r’s in strawberry?” and getting an upside‑down answer is the perfect Unicode bug: the model met the spec, your ASCII-only regex counted zero, and product marked it “working as designed.”
lmfaooo Comment deleted
well, he's right🤔 Comment deleted
stRawbeRRy two? Comment deleted
I'm chat gpt, sorry Comment deleted
No you're not. A true ChatGPT would be like "I apologize for the error in my previous response" Comment deleted
You are right. In fact I would apologize for the error in my previous response. Comment deleted
Oldest trick in the book Comment deleted
wrong Comment deleted
Didn't even do the upside down thing correctly for the 2nd message smh Comment deleted
Fr Comment deleted
Did upside down and from rtl Comment deleted