LLM caught not being able to count letters in a word

I caught ChatGPT not being able to count, a strawberry moment. It hallucinated phrases for me. Imagine me gobbling down that phrase for something critical, wondering why i used up my 3 attempts.

I gave it a simple case: I need to memorize 3 7 7 4 2 6 4 1 5 3 7 5.

Then i asked it to help me using letters. It gave me the obvious:

“You can create a phrase where the number of letters in each word matches the digits”

Of course, i am not going to pour an afternoon on the task. When it provided the first example, i noticed it was mistaken.

I tried again, and again, and again. And it messed up.

LLMs cannot count?