Exactly. If “st” is 123, “raw” is 456, “berry” is 789, and “r” is 17… it makes little sense to ask the models to count the [17]’s in [123,466,789]: it demands an awareness of the abstraction that does not exist.

To the extent the knowledge is there it’s from data in the input corpus, not direct examination of the text or tokens in the prompt.