Report: OpenAI Spends Millions a Year Miscounting the R’s in ‘Strawberry’

SAN FRANCISCO, CA — OpenAI, the most talked-about tech start-up of the decade, convened an emergency company-wide meeting Tuesday to address what executives are calling “the single greatest existential challenge facing artificial intelligence today”: Why can’t their models count the R’s in strawberry?

The controversy began shortly after the release of GPT-4, on March 2023, when users on Reddit and Twitter discovered the model’s inability to count the R’s in strawberry. The responses varied from inaccurate guesses to cryptic replies like, “More R’s than you can handle.” In one particularly unhinged moment, the chatbot signed off with, “Call me Sydney. That’s all you need to know.”

“I kept trying to count the R’s and it just wouldn’t do it,” said one user in a 17-post thread that went viral on Bluesky. “So I made it count other letters — T’s, B’s, you name it. No chance. Then it hit me: this thing is eating my letters. Letters today, kids tomorrow. Do we want that risk? It’s dangerous. It’s discriminatory. It’s terrifying. We want our children to live, don’t we?!”

At OpenAI headquarters, CEO Sam Altman struck a serious tone at the meeting, describing the R-counting debacle as a “crisis of faith” for the AI community. “I also think it’s a stupid question,” Altman admitted. “There are three R’s. I counted them this morning. But our users keep asking, and we are here to serve their revealed preferences. Can we please stop trying to make…