Even after five minutes, the logic has a (small) hole.

Not all odd spell out the digit: thirteen, fifteen (and maybe eleven?) are odd but don’t have an ‘e’ in the word’s “digit” part, though they obviously do elsewhere.

If the answer is supposed to be logically rigorous, o1 is incomplete for the reason you say.

If I was treating this as a lateral thinking puzzle (does anyone still do those for interview questions?) rather than a sensible request, I'd give numbers in a non-Latin character set, at which point it's easy: 一三五七九

(But even this only works for silly games, IMO).

4o: https://chatgpt.com/share/678ecbcd-a864-8007-9a34-e4e6574a2b... "Thus, the five odd numbers without an 'e' in their spelling are:

41, 43, 45, 47, and 49. "

o1: https://chatgpt.com/share/678ecbf8-ba20-8007-a33e-20ddbc545b... " 2 (two), 4 (four), 6 (six), 30 (thirty), 40 (forty)

Those five are “odd” (i.e., strange) choices, yet each spelled-out form has no letter e. This twist—treating “odd” to mean “strange” rather than “not even”—is usually the intended “gotcha” of the puzzle."

> This twist—treating “odd” to mean “strange” rather than “not even”—is usually the intended “gotcha” of the puzzle."

I like this one.

The 4o answer, on the other hand… unless I've missed something (and LLMs are increasingly highlighting to me the ways in which I do), it seems like the kind of wrong that gets LLMs a bad reputation?

It is! 4o is unfortunantely often very dumb in tricky circumstances, or is biased toward pundit-like opinions that are wrong. I'm not sure why that is the case, but the full o1 always has a "weight"/"presence" to it when I chat with it that suggests to me like a real intelligence. It can also solve difficult puzzles that 4o and me struggle with.

[Edit: I suppose the correct answer was for the full model]. What I got was much worse when I ran with hf.co/unsloth/DeepSeek-R1-Distill-Llama-8B-GGUF:Q8_0. (I think the glyph-based reasoning is especially hard for models though, since they have a token-level blindness to them):

  >>> Give me 5 odd numbers that don't have the letter 'e' in them.

  <think>
  Okay, so I need to come up with five odd numbers that don't have the letter 'e' in their name. Hmm, let's break this down step by step. First, what exactly is being asked here? The user wants numbers, specifically odd ones, and they can't contain the letter 'e'. So 
  I guess it's about the written form of the numbers, not their mathematical properties. For example, 13 is an odd number, and when you write it out, it's "thirteen," which does have an 'e' in it. So that wouldn't work.

  Alright, so I need to think of numbers where their names don't include 'e'. Let me start by listing some odd numbers and then check if each has an 'e' in their name. The first few odd numbers are 1, 3, 5, 7, 9, 11, 13, 15, 17, 19, 21, etc.

  Let's go one by one:

  1. "One": No 'e' here. So 1 is a candidate.
  2. "Three": Yes, that has an 'e'.
  3. "Five": Again, no 'e'. So 5 works.
  4. "Seven": Has an 'e' as well.
  5. "Nine": No 'e' in "nine". Good to go.

  Wait, so far I have 1, 5, and 9 as possible numbers. Let me keep going.
  <truncated by me...>
  Wait, let me make sure. The word "forty" is F-O-R-T-Y, no 'e', so adding "-one" which doesn't add an 'e' either. So yes, "forty-one" has no 'e's. So that's another number: 41.

  So now I have five numbers: 1, 5, 9, 19, and 41.

  Let me double-check each to ensure they don't contain the letter 'e':

  - One: No 'e'.
  - Five: No 'e'.
  - Nine: No 'e'.
  - Nineteen: No 'e'.
  - Forty-one: No 'e'.

  Yes, all of these are odd numbers and their names do not include the letter 'e'. I think that's a solid list.
  </think>

  Here is a list of five odd numbers whose names do not contain the letter 'e':

  1. **One**  
  2. **Five**  
  3. **Nine**  
  4. **Nineteen**  
  5. **Forty-one**

  These numbers are all odd, and their written forms do not include the letter 'e'.

Took 1m 36s for me. My default prompt is a bit different “think from first principles”. It’s pretty verbose but I enjoyed looking through all the work it did. Pretty impressive !

Uno https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/uno