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Gemini 3 Pro: the frontier of vision AI

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Re: Gemini 3 Pro: the frontier of vision AI

#142

Well It is the first model to get partial-credit on an LLM image test I have. Which is counting the legs of a dog. Specifically, a dog with 5 legs. This is a wild test, because LLMs get really pushy and insistent that the dog only has 4 legs. In fact GPT5 wrote an edge detection script to see where "golden dog feet" met "bright green grass" to prove to me that there were only 4 legs. The script found 5, and GPT-5 the…

I just tried to get Gemini to produce an image of a dog with 5 legs to test this out, and it really struggled with that. It either made a normal dog, or turned the tail into a weird appendage. Then I asked both Gemini and Grok to count the legs, both kept saying 4. Gemini just refused to consider it was actually wrong. Grok seemed to have an existential crisis when I told it it was wrong, becoming convinced that I ha…

It's not obvious to me whether we should count these errors as failures of intelligence or failures of perception. There's at least a loose analogy to optical illusion, which can fool humans quite consistently. Now you might say that a human can usually figure out what's going on and correctly identify the illusion, but we have the luxury of moving our eyes around the image and taking it in over time, while the model's perception is limited to a fixed set of unchanging tokens. Maybe this is relevant.

(Note I'm not saying that you can't find examples of failures of intelligence. I'm just questioning whether this specific test is an example of one).

Re: Gemini 3 Pro: the frontier of vision AI

#144

Well It is the first model to get partial-credit on an LLM image test I have. Which is counting the legs of a dog. Specifically, a dog with 5 legs. This is a wild test, because LLMs get really pushy and insistent that the dog only has 4 legs. In fact GPT5 wrote an edge detection script to see where "golden dog feet" met "bright green grass" to prove to me that there were only 4 legs. The script found 5, and GPT-5 the…

I just tried to get Gemini to produce an image of a dog with 5 legs to test this out, and it really struggled with that. It either made a normal dog, or turned the tail into a weird appendage. Then I asked both Gemini and Grok to count the legs, both kept saying 4. Gemini just refused to consider it was actually wrong. Grok seemed to have an existential crisis when I told it it was wrong, becoming convinced that I ha…

An interesting test in this vein that I read about in a comment on here is generating a 13 hour clock—I tried just about every prompting trick and clever strategy I could come up with across many image models with no success. I think there's so much training data of 12 hour clocks that just clobbers the instructions entirely. It'll make a regular clock that skips from 11 to 13, or a regular clock with a plaque saying "13 hour clock" underneath, but I haven't gotten an actual 13 hour clock yet.

Re: Gemini 3 Pro: the frontier of vision AI

#145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I just tried to get Gemini to produce an image of a dog with 5 legs to test this out, and it really struggled with that. It either made a normal dog, or turned the tail into a weird appendage. Then I asked both Gemini and Grok to count the legs, both kept saying 4. Gemini just refused to consider it was actually wrong. Grok seemed to have an existential crisis when I told it it was wrong, becoming convinced that I ha…

It's not obvious to me whether we should count these errors as failures of intelligence or failures of perception. There's at least a loose analogy to optical illusion, which can fool humans quite consistently. Now you might say that a human can usually figure out what's going on and correctly identify the illusion, but we have the luxury of moving our eyes around the image and taking it in over time, while the model…

I am having trouble understanding the distinction you’re trying to make here. The computer has the same pixel information that humans do and can spend its time analyzing it in any way it wants. My four-year-old can count the legs of the dog (and then say “that’s silly!”), whereas LLMs have an existential crisis because five-legged-dogs aren’t sufficiently represented in the training data. I guess you can call that perception if you want, but I’m comfortable saying that my kid is smarter than LLMs when it comes to this specific exercise.

Re: Gemini 3 Pro: the frontier of vision AI

#146

Well It is the first model to get partial-credit on an LLM image test I have. Which is counting the legs of a dog. Specifically, a dog with 5 legs. This is a wild test, because LLMs get really pushy and insistent that the dog only has 4 legs. In fact GPT5 wrote an edge detection script to see where "golden dog feet" met "bright green grass" to prove to me that there were only 4 legs. The script found 5, and GPT-5 the…

And just like that, you no longer have a good benchmark. Scrapers / AI developers will read this comment, and add 5-legged dogs to LLM's training data.

So much this. People don't realize that when 1 trillion (10 trillion, 100 trillion, whatever comes next) is at stake, there are no limits what these people will do to get them.

I will be very surprised if there are not at least several groups or companies scraping these "smart" and snarky comments to find weird edge cases that they can train on, turn into demo and then sell as improvement. Hell, they would've done it if 10 billion was at stake, I can't really imagine (and I have vivid imagination, to my horror) what Californian psychopaths can do for 10 trillion.

Re: Gemini 3 Pro: the frontier of vision AI

#147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t know much about AI, but I have this image test that everything has failed at. You basically just present an image of a maze and ask the LLM to draw a line through the most optimal path. Here’s how Nano Banana fared: https://x.com/danielvaughn/status/1971640520176029704?s=46

I just oneshot it with claude code (opus 4.5) using this prompt. It took about 5 mins and included detecting that it was cheating at first (drew a line around the boundary of the maze instead), so it added guardrails for that: ``` Create a devenv project that does the following: - Read the image at maze.jpg - Write a script that solves the maze in the most optimal way between the mouse and the cheese - Generate a new…

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Re: Gemini 3 Pro: the frontier of vision AI

#148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Remember when the Turing test was a thing? No one seems to remember it was considered serious in 2020 To be clear, it's only ever been a pop science belief that the Turing test was proposed as a literal benchmark. E.g. Chomsky in 1995 wrote: The question “Can machines think?” is not a question of fact but one of language, and Turing himself observed that the question is 'too meaningless to deserve discussion'.

The Turing test is a literal benchmark. Its purpose was to replace an ill-posed question (what does it mean to ask if a machine could "think", when we don't know ourselves what this means- and given that the subjective experience of the machine is unknowable in any case) with a question about the product of this process we call "thinking". That is, if a machine can satisfactorily imitate the output of a human brain,…

Turing seems to be saying several things. He writes:

>If the meaning of the words "machine" and "think" are to be found by examining how they are commonly used it is difficult to escape the conclusion that the meaning and the answer to the question, "Can machines think?" is to be sought in a statistical survey such as a Gallup poll. But this is absurd.

This anticipates the very modern social media discussion where someone has nothing substantive to say on the topic but delights in showing off their preferred definition of a word.

For example someone shows up in a discussion of LLMs to say:

"Humans and machines both use tokens".

This would be true as long as you choose a sufficiently broad definition of "token" but tells us nothing substantive about either Humans or LLMs.

Re: Gemini 3 Pro: the frontier of vision AI

#149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn't this proof that LLMs still don't really generalize beyond their training data?

I wonder how they would behave given a system prompt that asserts "dogs may have more or less than four legs".

That may work but what actual use would it be? You would be plugging one of a million holes. A general solution is needed.

Re: Gemini 3 Pro: the frontier of vision AI

#150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>They belong in different categories Categories of _what_, exactly? What word would you use to describe this "kind" of which LLMs and humans are two very different "categories"? I simply chose the word "cognition". I think you're getting hung up on semantics here a bit more than is reasonable.

> Categories of _what_, exactly? Precisely. At least apples and oranges are both fruits, and it makes sense to compare e.g. the sugar contents of each. But an LLM model and the human brain are as different as the wind and the sunshine. You cannot measure the windspeed of the sun and you cannot measure the UV index of the wind. Your choice of the words here was rather poor in my opinion. Statistical models do not have…

Wind and sunshine are both types of weather, what are you talking about?
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