Those are all the smallest models, and you don’t seem to have reasoning mode, or external tooling, enabled?

LLM ≠ AI system

It’s been known for some time, that LLMs do “vibe math”. Internally, they try to come up with an answer that “feels” right… which makes it pretty impressive for them to come anywhere close, within a ±10% error margin.

Ask people to tell you what a right answer could be, give them 1 second to answer… see how many come that close to the right one.

A chatbot/AI system on the other hand, will come up with some Python code to do the calculation, then run it. Still can go wrong, but it’s way less likely.

all explanation past the «are you counting the “rr” as a single r?» is babble

Not so sure about that. It treats r as a word, since it wasn’t specified as “r” or single letter. Then it interpretes it as… whatever. Is it the letter, phoneme, font, the programming language R… since it wasn’t specified, it assumes “whatever, or a mix of”.

It failed at detecting the ambiguity and communicating it spontaneously, but corrected once that became part of the conversation.

It’s like, in your examples… what do you mean by “by”? “3 by 6” is 36… you meant to “multiply 36”? That’s nonsense… 🤷