what do you mean by spell fine? They’re just emitting the tokens for the words. Like, it’s not writing “strawberry,” it’s writing tokens <302, 1618, 19772>, which correspond to st, raw, and berry respectively. If you ask it to put a space between each letter, that will disrupt the tokenization mechanism, and it’s going to be quite liable to making mistakes.

I don’t think it’s really fair to say that the lookup 19772 -> berry counts as the LLM being able to spell, since the LLM isn’t operating at that layer. It doesn’t really emit letters directly. I would argue its inability to reliably spell words when you force it to go letter-by-letter or answer queries about how words are spelled is indicative of its poor ability to spell.