Combinatorial explosion, and facts merely memorised is a huge waste of parameters that are better dedicated to effective reasoning. Not that we really know how to split facts from skills, though we are trying various approaches.
replyBeing able to spell all the words then count letters is simpler, and more generalisable to other tasks, than memorising answers to all possible word questions.
That said, we're so bad at splitting facts from skills that trying to get them to memorise a bunch of facts might force them to learn a skill and generalise anyway.
Ah, I misunderstood what you meant. I was just trying to highlight that in order to answer these types of questions the model needs to memorize the spelling of each token. But you're right that that's all they need to memorize, and algorithms like counting are pretty simple for transformers to implement.
reply> Why not?
replyBecause to "123x456" we want a reply that goes "this times that plus that...", not "Was that not nnnnnn?". If it does not perform its duty (returning solid checked answers) it is a liability.