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Watching o3 guess a photo's location is surreal, dystopian and entertaining

simonwillison.net

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Re: Watching o3 guess a photo's location is surreal, dystopian and entertaining

#191

Post by frozenseven »

simonw wrote: post #67
brookst wrote: post #45

I don’t understand the “dystopian” angle. Maybe I’m just old, but I remember the wonder when the Internet made most knowledge available with a few keystrokes. Having deductive reasoning with the same convenience feels wonderful, not dystopian.

Have you ever known anyone who's escaped from an abusive relationship? It's not at all uncommon for people to have legitimate reasons not to be found.

The supposed existence of your friend doesn't dictate policy, much less reality. It's already been explained to you that GeoGuessr exists and is very popular. What o3 can do, so can a million humans out there.

You are trying to manufacture outrage. Plain and simple.

Re: Watching o3 guess a photo's location is surreal, dystopian and entertaining

#192

Post by bjourne »

SamPatt wrote: post #63

I play competitive Geoguessr at a fairly high level, and I wanted to test this out to see how it compares. It's astonishingly good. It will use information it knows about you to arrive at the answer - it gave me the exact trailhead of a photo I took locally, and when I asked it how, it mentioned that it knows I live nearby. However, I've given it vacation photos from ages ago, and not only in tourist destinations eit…

Geoguessr pro zi8gzag tried out one of the AIs in a video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mQKoDSoxRAY It was indeed extremely impressive and for sure would have annihilated me, but I believe it would have no chance to beat zi8gzag or any other top player. But give it a year or two and I'm sure it will crush any human player. Geoguessr is, afaict, primarily about rote memorization of various features (such as types of electricity poles, road signage, foilage, etc.) which AIs excel at.

Re: Watching o3 guess a photo's location is surreal, dystopian and entertaining

#193

Post by GeoAtreides »

brookst wrote: post #45

I don’t understand the “dystopian” angle. Maybe I’m just old, but I remember the wonder when the Internet made most knowledge available with a few keystrokes. Having deductive reasoning with the same convenience feels wonderful, not dystopian.

That's because you haven't lived in an authoritarian regime. NKVD, STASI, Gestapo, would all have killed for such capabilities.

As an east european who grew up and lived in such a regime, I would like to respectfully remind all westerners their care-free and free lives is a privilege the majority of the world doesn't have.

Re: Watching o3 guess a photo's location is surreal, dystopian and entertaining

#194

Post by skydhash »

simonw wrote: post #186
skydhash wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Did it not, or no one was interested enough to build one? I’m pretty certain there’s a database of portraits somewhere where they search id details from photograph. Automatic tagging exists for photo software. I don’t see why that can be extrapolated to landmarks with enough data.

If it existed two years ago I certainly couldn't play with it on my phone.

You’re not playing with it on your phone. You’re accesing a service with your phone. Like saying you can use emacs on iOS when you are just ssh-ing to a remote linux box.

Re: Watching o3 guess a photo's location is surreal, dystopian and entertaining

#195

Post by tylersmith »

SamPatt wrote: post #178
bobro wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Did you include location metadata with the photos by chance? I’m pretty surprised by these results.

As a further test, I dropped the street view marker on a random point in the US, near Wichita, Kansas, here's the image: https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/gh/sampatt/media@main/posts/2025-04... I fed it o3, here's the response: https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/gh/sampatt/media@main/posts/2025-04... Nailed it. There's no metadata there, and the reasoning it outputs makes perfect sense. I have no doubt it'll be tricky when it can be, b…

This is right by where I grew up and the broadcast tower and turnpike sign were the first two things I noticed too, but the ability to realize it was the East side instead of the West side because the tower platforms are lower is impressive.

Re: Watching o3 guess a photo's location is surreal, dystopian and entertaining

#196

Post by belter »

Ok so if given LLM generated code...Will o3 be able to find commercial or open source code similar or very, very, similar to the LLM generated code? Meaning the training source code, possibly showing copyright violations?

So its own code version of "where was this photo taken?"

Re: Watching o3 guess a photo's location is surreal, dystopian and entertaining

#197

Post by simonw »

qarl wrote: post #190
simonw wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well that sucks, I thought I was being extremely transparent in my writing about this. I've updated my post several times based on feedback here and elsewhere already, and I showed my working at every step. Can't please everyone.

You ARE being extremely transparent. That's not what I complained about. My complaint is that you're saying "trust me" and that isn't transparent in the least. Am I wrong?

I said:

"I have now proven to myself that the models really can guess locations from photographs to the point where I am willing to stake my credibility on their ability to do that."

The "trust me bro" was a lighthearted joke.

Re: Watching o3 guess a photo's location is surreal, dystopian and entertaining

#198

Post by SamPatt »

cco wrote: post #187
joenot443 wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Super cool, man. Watching pro Geoguessr is my latest break-time activity, these geo-gods never cease to impress me. One thing I'm curious about - in high level play, how much of the meta involves knowing characteristics about the photography/equipment/etc. that Google used when they shot it? Frequently I'll watch rainbolt immediately know an African country from nothing but the road, is there something I'm missing?

Meh, meta is so boring and uninteresting to me personally. Knowing you're in Kenya because of the snorkel, that's just simple memorization. Pick up on geography, architecture, language, sun and street position; that's what I love. It's clearly necessary to compete at the high level though.

I hear you, a lot of people feel the same way. You can always just play NMPZ if you want to limit the meta.

I still enjoy it because of the competitive aspect - you both have access to the same information, who put in the effort to remember and recall it better?

If it were only meta I would hate it too. But there's always a nice mix in the vast majority of rounds. And always a few rounds here and there that are so hard they'll humble even the very best!

Re: Watching o3 guess a photo's location is surreal, dystopian and entertaining

#199

Post by brundolf »

fire_lake wrote: post #177
brundolf wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I find this type of problem is what current AI is best at: where the actual logic isn't very hard, but it requires pulling together and assimilating a huge amount of fuzzy, known information from various sources They are, after all, information-digesters

Which also fits with how it performs at software engineering (in my experience). Great at boilerplate code, tests, simple tutorials, common puzzles but bad at novel and complex things.

Yep. But wonderful at aggregating details from twelve different man pages to write a shell script I didn't even know was possible to write using the system utils

Re: Watching o3 guess a photo's location is surreal, dystopian and entertaining

#200

Post by simonw »

bjourne wrote: post #192
SamPatt wrote: post #63

I play competitive Geoguessr at a fairly high level, and I wanted to test this out to see how it compares. It's astonishingly good. It will use information it knows about you to arrive at the answer - it gave me the exact trailhead of a photo I took locally, and when I asked it how, it mentioned that it knows I live nearby. However, I've given it vacation photos from ages ago, and not only in tourist destinations eit…

Geoguessr pro zi8gzag tried out one of the AIs in a video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mQKoDSoxRAY It was indeed extremely impressive and for sure would have annihilated me, but I believe it would have no chance to beat zi8gzag or any other top player. But give it a year or two and I'm sure it will crush any human player. Geoguessr is, afaict, primarily about rote memorization of various features (such as types o…

Looks like that video uses Gemini 2.0 (probably Flash) in streaming mode (via AI studio) from a few months ago. Gemini 2.5 might do better, but in my explorations so far o3 is hugely more capable than even Gemini 2.5 right now.
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