Why Google's AI can't spell Google (or anything else)

Google's AI Overviews are making basic spelling errors — claiming 'Google' has two P's, misspelling 'journalism' and 'Trump' — because LLMs fundamentally don't process text as letters and words. Built on transformer architectures, these models tokenize input into numerical encodings rather than reading character by character, making letter-counting and spelling inherently unreliable. Researchers acknowledge this is a structural limitation of current tokenization approaches with no clear fix on the horizon, and Google has confirmed it's working on the issue.