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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

#321

Post by jeswin »

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.

> novel and complex things

a) What's an example?

b) Is 90% (or more) of programming mundane, and not really novel?

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

#322

Post by expensive_news »

gf000 wrote: post #274
imatworkyo wrote: post #265

Earlier quoted context omitted.

how often are we truly writing actual novel programs that are complex in a way AI does not excel at? There are many types of complex, and many times complex for a human coder, are trivial for AI and its skillset.

Depends on the field of development you do. CRUD backend app for a business in a common sector? It's mostly just connecting stuff together (though I would argue that an experienced dev with a good stack takes less time to write it as is than painstakingly explaining it to an LLM in an inexact human language). Some R&D stuff, or even debugging any kind of code? It's almost useless, as it would require deep reasoning,…

I agree with this. I do mostly DevOps stuff for work and it’s great at telling me about errors with different applications/build processes. Just today I used it to help me scrape data from some webpages and it worked very well.

But when I try to do more complicated math it falls short. I do have to say that Gemini Pro 2.5 is starting to get better in this area though.

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

#323

Post by genewitch »

brundolf wrote: post #199
fire_lake wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

[flagged]

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

#324

Post by bdangubic »

Aerroon wrote: post #318
Timwi wrote: post #291

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Give it something weird and it'll continuously trip over itself. And so will almost all humans. It's weird how people refuse to ascribe any human-level intelligence to it until it starts to compete with the world top elite.

A human can play tictactoe or any other simple game in a few minutes after being described the game. AI will do all kinds on interesting things that either are against the rules or will be extremely poor choices. Yeah, I tried playing tictactoe with chatGPT and it did not do well.

most humans i played against did not do well either :)

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

#325

Post by [deleted] »

jeswin wrote: post #321
fire_lake wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> novel and complex things a) What's an example? b) Is 90% (or more) of programming mundane, and not really novel?

[deleted]

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

#326

Post by nurettin »

jeswin wrote: post #321
fire_lake wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> novel and complex things a) What's an example? b) Is 90% (or more) of programming mundane, and not really novel?

If you'd like a creative waste of time, make it implement any novel algorithm that mixes the idea of X with Y. It will fail miserably, double down on the failure and hard troll you, run out of context and leave you questioning why you even pay for this thing. And it is not something that can be fixed with more specific training.

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

#328

Post by chatmasta »

SamPatt wrote: post #292
xlii wrote: post #209

Tried the same, results made me laugh. Completely clueless. I've seen passing prompts 8 about how it's not in the city I am and yet it tries again and again. My favourite moment was when it started analysing piece of blurry asphalt. After 6 minutes o3 it was confidently wrong: https://imgur.com/a/jYr1fz1 IMO not-in-US is actually great test if something was in LLMs data and the whole search is a for show.

I'm surprised to hear that. I keep running tests and the results are incredible, not only in the US. For example, here's a screenshot from a random location I found in Google Street View in Jordan: https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/gh/sampatt/media@main/posts/2025-04... And here's o3 nailing it: https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/gh/sampatt/media@main/posts/2025-04... Maybe using Google Street View images, zoomed out, tends to give mor…

I’ve had nearly 100% success with vacation photos in Europe, some simple landscapes and some obscured angles of landmarks. And that’s using the free ChatGPT with no CoT.

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

#329

Post by genewitch »

mimischi wrote: post #232
pcthrowaway wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Based on the type of grass and the direction of the wind. There was a scene in High Potential (murder-of-the-week sleuth savant show) where a crime was solved by (in part) the direction the wind was blowing in a video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O1ZOzck4bBI

In 2017, the Hollywood actor Shia LaBeouf (and two others artists from a trio called "LaBeouf, Rönkkö & Turner") put up a flag in an undisclosed location as part of their "HEWILLNOTDIVIDE.US" work [1]. > On March 8, 2017, the stream resumed from an "unknown location", with the artists announcing that a flag emblazoned with the words "He Will Not Divide Us" would be flown for the duration of the presidency. The camera…

> other techniques

including honking a horn and seeing if the camera picked it up.

We did this once when trying to find someone's house who was transmitting on a CB. it was my first transmitter hunt and i learned 2 lessons: people don't like it when you honk your horn to see if you can hear it through their microphone (but really it was to see if they said 'is that you honking, what a jerk'); and secondly, if the person switches to a handheld transmitter when they think you're getting close, it completely throws you off.

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

#330

Post by Spivak »

leptons wrote: post #286
lesinski wrote: post #281

This reminds me of when people are watching YouTubeTV and they see an ad for something they were talking about and are like, "Woah, it must be listening to us!" When actually, modern ML can make really good guesses about ad relevancy using your location, data partners and recent searches from your home's IP address. When you explain this to people, they will still be convinced that the computer is listening to you an…

>and recent searches from your home's IP address This is the "Woah, it must be listening to us" part. Because it is listening, not only just sound.

The part that is crazy is when it's able to piece something together that neither I nor my partner have searched for, looked at, seemingly given any digital trail for outside of talking about it between ourselves. Which is why I think people assume it must be mic data but that undersells the magic, it would still work even if your phones were miles away.
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