Google AI Overview Misses Simple Letter Counts
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- Google's AI overview mistakenly reported letter counts in words, such as two “Ps” in “Google” and one “r” in “poop”, and also misspelled “journalism” and “Trump”.
- Google previously displayed an erroneous definition for the search term “disregard”, showing a generic prompt instead of a dictionary entry.
- Google told TechCrunch that counting within words is a known LLM challenge and that it is working to fix the issue.
- Matthew Guzdial, AI researcher at the University of Alberta, explained that transformer‑based LLMs encode text as tokens rather than individual letters, which underlies the spelling errors.
Why it matters: Google’s miscounts erode user confidence in Gemini‑powered Search, risking slower adoption of the AI across Chrome and Mac and pressuring the company to prioritize accuracy fixes.
