But it's not relevant as a metric to gauge distance to human intelligence. Humans see individual letters, LLMs do not. If I asked you the relative activation of the cones in your retina as I showed you some solid color image, you couldn't do it. You simply do not have cognitive access to that information. But that says nothing about your intelligence.

A more accurate test would be to give it a list of words (or anything represented as a single token) and ask it how many times that token appeared. I'm sure they have no trouble at that task.