Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

simonwillison.net

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

241–250 of 453 posts

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

#241

Post by wkat4242 »

simonw wrote: post #236
mimischi wrote: post #235

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also wondering if, as another commenter mentioned, it might be trying to estimate your location just by network means.

It absolutely does that - o3 knows your current location based on IP address etc. This means for a fair test you need to use a photo taken nowhere near your current vicinity - that's why I added examples for Madagascar and Buenos Aires at the end of my post: https://simonwillison.net/2025/Apr/26/o3-photo-locations/#up...

And of course make sure you turn off geotagging in the exif :)

But really, if Google Street View data (or similar) is entirely part of the training dataset it is more than expected that it has this capability.

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

#242

Post by mvdtnz »

Tacite wrote: post #238

Is it an US thing? I tried with 17 pictures from Europe and Asia, not in capital cities but in fairly big cities, and it didn't guess any. Sometimes it got the country correct but that was because of signs, so I could have guessed it too.

It's a guy who uploaded a photo with EXIF data and believes the made up explanation given by the "AI".

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

#243

Post by nutrientharvest »

energy123 wrote: post #204
tippytippytango wrote: post #203

The python zoom in seems performative. A vision model already has access to all the data, how does zooming in help it? Still very cool that it can!

Yeah, once it gets converted into tokens how does "zooming in" somehow increase information content?

It's cropping the original image then tokenizing it again with less downsampling, not cropping its internal representation.

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

#245

Post by forgotTheLast »

I tried it twice with 4o and the results were comical:

- picture taken on a road through a wooded park: It correctly guessed north america based on vegetation. Then incorrectly guessed Minnesota based on the type of fence. I tried to steer it in the right direction by pointing out license plates and signage but it then hallucinated a front license plate from Ontario on a car that didn't have any, then hallucinated a red/black sign as a blue/green Parks Ontario sign.

- picture through a middle density residential neighborhood: it correctly guessed the city based on the logo on a compost bin but then guessed the wrong neighborhood. I tried to point out a landmark in the photo and it insisted that the photo was taken in the wrong neighborhood, going as far as giving the wrong address for one of the landmarks, imagining another front license plate on a car that didn't have one, and imagined a backstory for a supposedly well known stray cat in the photo.

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

#246

Post by cgriswald »

thegeomaster wrote: post #39

For all of the images I've tried, the base model (e.g. 4o) already has a ~95% accurate idea of where the photo is, and then o3 does so much tool use only to confirm its intuition from the base model and slightly narrow down. For OP's initial image, 4o in fact provides a more accurate initial guess of Carmel-by-the-Sea (d=~100mi The clue is in the CoT - you can briefly see the almost correct location as the very first…

For my image I chose a large landscape with lots of trees and a single piece of infrastructure.

o3 correctly guessed the correct municipality during its reasoning but landed on naming some nearby municipalities instead and then giving the general area as its final answer.

Given the piece of infrastructure getting close should have lead to ah exact result. The reasoning never considered the piece of infrastructure. This seems to be in spite of all the resizing of the image.

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

#247

Post by intalentive »

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…

I wonder how it compares with StreetCLIP.

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

#248

Post by [deleted] »

mvdtnz wrote: post #242
Tacite wrote: post #238

Is it an US thing? I tried with 17 pictures from Europe and Asia, not in capital cities but in fairly big cities, and it didn't guess any. Sometimes it got the country correct but that was because of signs, so I could have guessed it too.

It's a guy who uploaded a photo with EXIF data and believes the made up explanation given by the "AI".

[deleted]

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

#249

Post by kqr »

simonw wrote: post #152
neurostimulant wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> when I asked it how, it mentioned that it knows I live nearby. > The process for how it arrives at the conclusion is somewhat similar to humans. It looks at vegetation, terrain, architecture, road infrastructure, signage, and it just knows seemingly everything about all of them. Can we trust what the model says when we ask it about how it comes up with an answer?

Not at all. Models have no invisible internal state that they can access between prompts. If you ask "how did you know that?" you are effectively asking "given the previous transcript of our conversation, come up with a convincing rationale for what you just said".

On the other hand, since they "think in writing" they also do not keep any reasoning secret from us. Whatever they actually did is based on past transcript plus training.
Post reply on HN