Author here - it's a fair criticism, and I point it out in the article. However, I kept it in for a few reasons.

I'm trying to show the model's full capabilities for image location generally, not just playing geoguessr specifically. The ability to combine web search with image recognition, iteratively, is powerful.

Also, the web search was only meaningful in the Austria round. It did use it in the Ireland round too, but as you can see by the search terms it used, it already knew the road solely from image recognition.

It beat me in the Colombia round without search at all.

It's worthwhile to do a proper apples and apples comparison - I'll run it again and update the post. But the point was to show how incredibly capable the model is generally, and the lack of search won't change that. Just read the chain of thought, it's incredible!

There's some level at which an AI 'player' goes from being competitive with a human player, matching better-trained human strategy against a more impressive memory, to just a cheaty computer with too much memorization. Finding that limit is the interesting thing about this analysis, IMO!

It's not interesting playing chess against Stockfish 17, even for high-level GMs. It's alien and just crushes every human. Writing down an analysis to 20 move depth, following some lines to 30 or more, would be cheating for humans. It would take way too long (exceeding any time controls and more importantly exceeding the lifetime of the human), a powerful computer can just crunch it in seconds. Referencing a tablebase of endgames for 7 pieces would also be cheating, memorizing 7 terabytes of bitwise layouts is absurd but the computer just stores that on its hard drive.

Human geoguessr players have impressive memories way above baseline with respect to regional infrastructure, geography, trees, road signs, written language, and other details. Likewise, human Jeopardy players know an awful lot of trivia. Once you get to something like Scrabble or chess, it's less and less about knowing words or knowing moves, but more about synthesizing that knowledge intelligently.

One would expect a human to recognize some domain names like, I don't know, osu.edu: lots of people know that's Ohio State University, one of the biggest schools in the US, located in Columbus, Ohio. They don't have to cheat and go to an external resource. One would expect a human (a top human player, at least) to know that taxilinder.at is based in Austria. One would never expect any human to have every business or domain name memorized.

With modern AI models trained on internet data, searching the internet is not that different from querying its own training data.

To reframe your takeaway: you want to benchmark the "system" and see how capable it is. The boundaries of the system are somewhat arbitrary: is it "AI + web" or "only AI", and it is not about fairness as much as about "what do you, the evaluator, want to know".

> There's some level at which an AI 'player' goes from being competitive with a human player, matching better-trained human strategy against a more impressive memory, to just a cheaty computer with too much memorization. Finding that limit is the interesting thing about this analysis, IMO!

And a lot of human competitions aren't designed in such a way that the competition even makes sense with "AI." A lot of video games make this pretty obvious. It's relatively simple to build an aimbot in a first-person shooter that can outperform the most skilled humans. Even in ostensibly strategic games like Starcraft, bots can micro in ways that are blatantly impossible for humans and which don't really feel like an impressive display of Starcraft skill.

Another great example was IBM Watson playing Jeopardy! back in 2011. We were supposed to be impressed with Watson's natural language capabilities, but if you know anything about high-level Jeopardy! then you know that all you were really seeing is that robots have better reflexes than humans, which is hardly impressive.

You seem indicate you want a computer to beat a human without ever using what a computer is actually good at(large memories, brute force compute etc). That seems a little ridiculous to me. How do you want it to engage? Disallowed use of native compute and must simulate a full human brain?

Sure I do agree that the web search is too far, because it's literally cheating. But stockfish is super human at chess, it doesn't really matter that it can do this by leveraging the strengths of a computer.

I disagree, if we're gonna be hyping up machines for their prowess at "thinking" and being artificially "intelligent" in that soft effusive human way then yeah I think its fair criticism. We already knew from the 50s that computers are like stupid geniuses when it comes to following algorithms and crunching computations far too expansive and tedious for any human.

The point is that from a black box view they are rapidly surpassing humans in a lot of fields. You can say they do it with tools the human mind has no access to. That's probably true. The "soft effusive human way" to be intelligent is also black box, and something we aren't even close to understanding. This means it's as close to be able to be measured as string theory. "If it's not exactly like this thing we don't understand it's not fair".

They're not a black box though. They're querying an external resource (Google Search). That's crossing an API boundary. If you're going to let them use Google Search then let the human opponent use Google Search as well.

It's like if you were building an AI robot to run a marathon against a human opponent, except you let the AI robot ride a motorcycle and force the human to stay on foot.

Search was irrelevant in this case. I ran it again without search and it made the same guesses. I updated the post with those details.

I didn't say the AI is black box, I said if you take a black box view. That last word is load bearing.

Did you read the article? It's clearly shown that with or without search it doesn't make much of a difference how good it actually is.

> It's not interesting playing chess against Magnus, even for high-level GMs. He just crushes almost every human

The differences even among humans between the absolute best & those out of the top 10 tend to be pretty drastic. And a non-IM against Magnus won't even understand what's going on. You could similarly claim that Magnus just memorized a bunch of openings which is similar to criticism GMs level too which is why Chess960 is now gaining more traction. My point is that there's not really such a thing as "fair" in a competition.

Re geoguessr, why not let them whatever tools are available? I have similar critiques about bike racing & restrictions on the technology advancements they can put on the bike. But every competition chooses arbitrary lines to draw which compose the rules so it doesn't really matter.

I mean Geoguessr explicitly states when you launch the game (in PvP mode) that googling/searching is bannable

Geoguessr is a game with artificial rules though. If I want the AI to solve a task I care about the result, not what tools it uses.

That’s exactly my point. Evaluating the task success independent of artificial limitations that are specific to the game doesn’t invalidate the result.

As another example you can consider the apparently successful DOTA2 and Starcraft 2 bots. They'd be interesting if they taught us new ideas about the games in the same way that AlphaGo's God move uncovered something new about Go. But they didn't. They excelled through superior micro and flawless execution of quite simple strategies. Watching pros trying to hold off waves of perfectly microed blink stalkers reminded me of seeing a chess engine in action. A computer grinding down their doomed human opponent using the advantages offered by being a computer rather than superior human-like play.

I'm pretty sure that the bots changed the dieback meta around the last TI in seattle when openai last did their demo pre canada TI. So I disagree that the "ai taught us nothing". Prior to that dieback was seen bad. After that people did the math and realized that spam respawn, the money and growth matter more. They may have altered the game after that, I don't know. I only paid attention when it was at Climate Pledge / Key.

The AI's play meaningfully added ideas of ways to play dota2 iirc. It wasn't just buying back, the way they played around early advantage hyper aggressive, not much farming, spam buying regen to stay out etc.

On the other hand you could generally beat the first "1v1 mid" bot by just cutting the wave behind its tower. So adaptation to new stuff was not good in isolation.

I would have loved to know whether given more time/prep/replays/practice pros would have figured out the holes. My guess is yes

If all internet data could be saved in a disk, alongside with model weights, then what's the difference of pulling the knowledge out of the weights exclusively, versus weights and jpeg images? I don't see any difference.

The only difference might be compression, model weights throw away the noise and save the signal only.

For me humans versus machines is not an interesting competition. Machines will always win in a narrow specialized domain.

A more interesting competition is a very experienced human, versus an amateur who knows how to use A.I. Statistical/probabilistic models get confused, and they can easily wander aimlessly into rabbit holes. But a human who knows how to control the A.I. but is amateur at that particular narrow task, could guide it and at the end perform the same, or even better than the more experienced person.

In chess that's not true due to the super narrowed down domain of 64 squares and 6 different pieces, but anything that is more general a natty intelligence is necessary.

When I use it for programming, I never ask it to write code, i guide it to write that function, and use that other function from a library. If it is let free to guess, it will guess correctly 90% to 99% of the time, but if it is instructed then the code is almost flawless, nine nines percent of accuracy.

Your assessment of computer chess could use a bit of elaboration. A strong human can easily play an entire game blindfolded - even in blitz/high speed time controls. So seeing a line 30 moves out is not especially remarkable. What makes computers so unbelievably strong in chess is much like in other domains, and it's pretty boring - they will literally never make a simple oversight or blunder. Even the best human players regularly make "simple" mistakes even on the current move, let alone in one's distant analyses.

So 98% of the moves a computer will play are not especially surprising at all. A strong human will just about always have at least considered the move and even if not - they'll immediately understand the point. And in the 2% there's a relatively simple explanation. Computer's inability to make short-term mistakes lets them consider ideas humans never would. For instance humans tend to like material, yet there are a shockingly large number of positions where a modern computer will sac a piece and then just continue on playing a piece down in what "feels" like a fairly normal position. It simply turns out that your opponent simply has no way to convert their material advantage, and so your positional advantage will tell in the longrun, even being a piece down! At least if you're a computer...

This has led to some interesting outcomes. For instance Fabiano Caruana, a top 10 player in the world, is extremely well known for his exceptional level of deep and creative opening preparation, all computer approved. But in more than a few instances he's ended up in positions that look bad but where a computer will say he's practically winning, and ultimately go on to lose the game. It's simply because these sort of positions might indeed be objectively winning, but it may require 10 or 20 practically perfect moves - whereas a single subtle mistake means you lose. And it's extremely hard for even the best players in the world to play like this.

> A strong human can easily play an entire game blindfolded - even in blitz/high speed time controls. So seeing a line 30 moves out is not especially remarkable.

How are these points connected? Playing blindfolded doesn’t require being able to calculate 30 moves deep (or any particular number).

Being able to remember/visualize an N move sequence without losing the thread while blindfolded is not at all the same thing as being able to calculate N moves deep.

I assume you mean because when a human is calculating some variation 30 moves deep that we're obviously discarding a ridiculous chunk of the overall game tree possibilities? Absolutely true, but the same is also true of computers. For instance I just let Stockfish 17 run on the starting position until it got to a reported depth of 30. It took almost exactly 10 seconds while running at ~3.2 million nodes per second. So it assessed about 32 million positions to get to a reported depth of 30 (which is 15 moves for each side), but there's at least something like 8e41 possible positions there (that's assuming a low average of 25 possible moves per position). So it's discarding a percent of moves that pretty safely rounds up to 100%.

Another example to illustrate the point is the ICCF (International Correspondence Chess Federation). Were computers comparably competent at long-term play as they are at short-term, then there wouldn't even be a competition. It'd simply be who has the strongest computer. But in reality that seems to play no particularly decisive factor. For instance, as in "normal" chess, there remains a huge gender divide in ratings, yet females certainly have no less access to competent hardware than males.

No, a blindfolded human chess player isn't calculating a selective variation 30 moves deep. They've memorized the current state of the board, and update it when their assistant (not blindfolded) tells them the opponent's move. That's completely different from imagining millions of future possible boards simultaneously.

This is not really how it works, at least not internally. For instance the record for blindfold simultaneous games is 48. Playing that by anything even remotely like conscious memory would probably be impossible. If it were simply a game of conscious memory then a highly competent memory competitor should be able to play (even if to a poor standard) multiple blindfold games, yet in reality he'd probably be unable to play a single one - even if he is entirely capable of memorizing a deck of cards, which is vastly more 'state' than a chess position. And vice versa, test a highly competent blindfold player in a general memory game and he'd be unlikely to do much better than above average.

Chess, for a stronger player, is very much like a language - in fact it uses the exact same area of the brain. It's like when you read these words, you're not consciously thinking at all - the meaning just comes to you immediately. And in fact you could trivially recall everything I said (even if not necessarily verbatim) if you just thought for a second or so. But simultaneously it's not like you actually made any effort whatsoever to memorize it.

So how long of a conversation could you hold with yourself in your mind? Practically endless, and you could probably reconstruct the overwhelming majority of it on demand. It's the same with chess. Meandering around in your mind to positions of an arbitrary depth is not difficult for a strong player. And the person I was responding to felt that a player writing down some analysis to move 20 would be some meaningful form of cheating. In reality, I'd absolutely love for my opponent to be able to write down their analyses. It'd waste just a monumental amount of time and afford no advantage whatsoever. It'd be akin to you writing down the conversation from your mind.

It's still as much cheating as googling. Completely irrelevant. Even if it were to beat Blinky, it's not different from googlers/scripters.

I disagree. I ran those rounds again, without search this time, and the results were nearly identical:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43837832

I tried the image without search and it talked about Dornbirn anyway but ended up choosing Bezau which is really quite close.

edit - the models are also at a disadvantage in a way too, they don't have a map to look at while the pick the location.

Yes, I re-ran those rounds and it made the same guesses without search, within 1km I believe.

You're right about not having a map - I cannot imagine trying to line up the Ireland coast round without referencing the map.

The author did specifically point out that

> Using Google during rounds is technically cheating - I’m unsure about visiting domains you find during the rounds though. It certainly violates the spirit of the game, but it also shows the models are smart enough to use whatever information they can to win.

and had noted in the methodology that

> Browsing/tools — o3 had normal web access enabled.

Still an interesting result - maybe more accurate to say O3+Search beats a human, but could also consider the search index/cache to just be a part of the system being tested.

Pointing out that it is cheating doesn't excuse the lie in the headline. That just makes it bait and switch, a form of fraud. OP knew they were doing a bait and switch.

I remember when we were all pissed about clickbait headlines because they were deceptive. Did we just stop caring?

Cheating implies there's a game. There isn't.

> Titles and headlines grab attention, summarize content, and entice readers to engage with the material

I'm sorry you felt defrauded instead. To me the title was very good at conveying to me the ability of o3 in geolocating photos.

Title says o3 beat a [human] player. That implies there is some competition that has the capacity to be fair or unfair.

Presumably being an AI is technically against the GeoGuessr rules so I don't see how there can be an expectation that those rules were followed.

Sure, but o3 is itself already an online service backed by an enormous data set, so regardless of whether it also searched the web, it's clearly not literally "playing fair" against a human.

But it still bounds the competition. OP is skilled in the domain. I'm not, so if I wrote a post about how O3 beat me you'd be saying how mundane of a result it is. I mean, I suck at Geoguesser. Beating me isn't impressive. This is also a bound

> But it still bounds the competition.

Bounded to...a model trained on virtually all publicly available text ever generated by humans. I wouldn't expect web searches to even help much unless they're turning up data from after the model was trained.

  > Bounded to...a model trained on virtually all publicly available text ever generated by humans

Don't forget there's a lot of non-public data too!

I don't disagree, but my point is that some bound is better than no bound. I think we can certainly agree that there are even better bounds than others. Obviously we won't ever have a full equal comparison, but I think the bounds do allow for some insights to be gained. We just need to be cautious that those insights consider those bounds (I believe we both are cautious about what insights can be gained. If you doubt me, see my other comments. I do push back on OP pretty hard)

  > unless they're turning up data from after the model was trained.

Only under the condition that the models perform lossless compression of all data trained on. If the compression is lossy, then search will reduce that loss.

Please stop using the word "we." I don't consent to you speaking for me.

Look up "royal we".

We all know about the "royal we". We still don't appreciate your (the "royal your") usage of it.

Do "we all" know?

The people pissed about clickbait headlines were often overstating things to drum up outrage and accumulate more hacker news upboats...

I'm not sure why you're defending clickbait. It is just fraud. I'm not sure why we pretend it is anything different.

Sure, people made overblown claims about the effects, but that doesn't justify fraud. A little fraud is less bad than major fraud, but that doesn't mean it isn't bad.

On the one hand, you have SEO mills churning out crap and A/B testing clickthrough rates on different headline/image combinations. That's bad.

On the other hand, you have a blogger choosing a headline for a cool thing that they did and wrote up...

The author here writes up what happens. They include ample discussion of search in their write-up. They do not need to write the entire blog post in the title in order to avoid 'fraud.' Yeesh.

IDK what SEO mills and all that have to do with any of this. What other people do doesn't matter. It's something is bad then it doesn't make it not bad because other people do it and do it worse. There's no logic in that framing.

I'm not sure who you think is a fool, me or you. But either way, I don't find your rhetoric acceptable. I explained why I think the title significantly diverges from the content of the article. You're welcome to disagree but that argument will have nothing to do with SEO mills. It's insulting you'd think I'd accept such a silly retort. We're not comparing here, we're categorizing.

In short, the title of the piece is in no way fraudulent: No one is being defrauded here, and I don't believe there was any intent to defraud anyone.

The title is not click bait. Titles might be better or worse for their content, but imperfection is not fraud.

I'm sorry. You have failed the assignment. You have written an assertion, not an argument. I'm not willing to just take your word on it.

But thank you for clarifying the implicit question in my earlier comment.

The headline said the AI beat him, it did not say it beat him in a GeoGuessr game. The article clearly states what he did and why.

One of the rules is banning the use of third-party software or scripts.

Any LLM attempting to play will lose because of that rule. So, if you know the rules, and you strictly adhere to them (as you seem to be doing) than no need to click on the link. You already know it's not playing buy GeoGuesser rules.

That being said, if you are running a test, you are free to set the rules as you see fit and explain so, and under the conditions set by the person running the test, these are the results.

> Did we just stop caring?

We stopped caring about pedantry. Especially when the person being pedantic seems to cherry pick to make their point.

Technically the LLM is 3rd party software so the use of it is cheating. QED

This doesn't mean you shouldn't try to make things as far as possible. Yes, it would still technically violate rules, but don't pretend like this is binary.

  > We stopped caring about pedantry

Did we? You see to be responding to my pedantic comment with a pedantic comment.

What's your suggestion for an alternative headline?

  Can O3 Beat a Master-Level GeoGuessr?
  How Good is O3 at GeoGuessr?
  EXIF Does Not Explain O3's GeoGuessr's Performance
  O3 Plays GeoGuessr (EXIF Removed)

But honestly, OP had the foresight to remove EXIF data and memory from O3 to reduce contamination. The goal of the blog post was to show that O3 wasn't cheating. So by including search, they undermine the whole point of the post.

The problem really stems from the lack of foresight. Lack of misunderstanding the critiques they sought to address in the first place. A good engineer understands that when their users/customers/<whatever> makes a critique, that what the gripe is about may not be properly expressed. You have to interpret your users complaints. Here, the complaint was "cheating", not "EXIF" per se. The EXIF complaints were just a guess at the mechanism in which it was cheating. But the complaint was still about cheating.

>The goal of the blog post was to show that O3 wasn't cheating.

No, the goal of the post was to show that o3 has incredible geolocation abilities. It's through the lens of a Geoguessr player who has experience doing geolocation, and my perspective on whether the chain of thought is genuine or nonsense.

In Simon's original post, people were claiming that o3 doesn't have those capabilities, and we were fooled by a chain of thought that was just rationalizing the EXIF data. It only had the _appearance_ of capability.

The ability to perform web search doesn't undermine the claim that o3 has incredible geolocation abilities, because it still needs to have an underlying capability in order to know what to search. That's not true for simply reading EXIF data.

This is the best way I knew to show that the models are doing something really neat. Disagreements over the exact wording of my blog post title seem to be missing the point.

  > No, the goal of the post was to 

I think you misinterpret my point. The goal of your post is distinct from how people will interpret it. Plenty of times people intend one thing and get a different thing. That's life.

  > In Simon's original post, people were claiming that o3 doesn't have those capabilities, and we were fooled by a chain of thought that was just rationalizing the EXIF data. It only had the _appearance_ of capability.

And this is the key part!

The people questioning O3's capabilities were concerned with cheating. Any mention of EXIF is a guess as to how it was cheating, but the suspicion is still that it is cheating. That's the critique!

If you framed the title as "O3 Does Not Need EXIF Data To Beat A Master-Level GeoGuessr" then I wouldn't have made my comment. The claim is much more specific and reflects the results of your post. You did in fact show that it doesn't need EXIF data to do what it does! BUT by framing it as "Beats a Master-Level" there is an implicit claim that both of you are playing the same game. The fact that you weren't is the issue.

Look at it this way. If I said I beat Tiger Woods at golf and then casually slipped in that I was playing with a handicap, wouldn't you feel a bit lied to? You'd think "Did Godelski really beat Tiger Woods?", and you would mean without the handicap. You'd have every right to be suspicious! And you'd have every right to dismiss me.

Most importantly, take a second here. My whole point is that you can make a much stronger claim! One where there wouldn't be a significant divergence between title and content. I get that it is frustrating to receive criticism, but even if you believe I'm wrong to do so, is it not more effective to show me up by just redoing without search? If you do that, then you only end up with a stronger claim. But by disagreeing and arguing here you're just not convincing me. Even if you disagree with my interpretation of the title, you know full well that it is a valid interpretation. Given the pushback from other comments I think you can't deny that it isn't an unexpected one. So the only way to resolve this is to either change the title or change the data. Besides, you responded to the top comment about how it was a fair criticism. All I've done is explain why the criticism was made in the first place!

And yes, it still undermines the result. Because that is entirely dependent on the (interpretation of the) claim that was made. Your results are still valid, but they only satisfy a weaker claim.

FWIW, I think the updated post is better. My comment here would only be that you could add clarity by showing the non-search scores (especially in the final table). In fact, the "study" being done with and without search makes a stronger post than had it only been one way. So kudos!

You've clearly thought this through, and I agree that had I been more precise at the start it would have avoided some confusion. I'm glad you like the updated post.

This seems like a great example of why some are so concerned with AI alignment.

The game rules were ambiguous and the LLM did what it needed to (and was allowed to) to win. It probably is against the spirit of the game to look things up online at all but no one thought to define that rule beforehand.

No, the game rules aren't ambiguous. This is 100% unambiguously cheating. From the list of things that are definitely considered cheating in the rules:

> using Google or other external sources of information as assistance during play.

The contents of URLs found during play is clearly an external source of information.

I believed the rules were not explained to the model so it does use what it can.

Then you can 100% not claim it is “Playing” the game

That right there *is the alignment problem*.

If I task an AI with "peace on earth" and the solution the AI comes up with is ripped from The X-Files* and it kills everyone, it isn't good enough to say "that's cheating" or "that's not what I meant".

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Je_Souhaite

It's playing a game in which the rules are a bit ambiguous if not explained.

And in reality the set of rules we would need can never be fully explained.

Alignment is the goal of having an AI system understand what we would want it to do even when the rules weren't predefined. That's an impossible task, or rather its seemingly impossible and we don't yet know how to do it.

That's the alignment problem. We intended a certain set of rules but didn't define them completely, or there were conditions we didn't consider.

An AI wouldn't have to maliciously break a rule to go wrong. The point is that the system could so exactly what it was supposed to do, it plays within the given rules but the outcomes aren't what we wanted or intended.

o3 already is an external source of information. It's an online service backed by an enormous model generated from an even more enormous corpus of text via an enormous amount of computing power.

o3 was the thing beating GeoGuessr. It isn't external to itself.

Sure, then o3 plus the World Wide Web was the thing playing the game, and also isn’t external to itself.

Right, and that’s indeed impressive! But still not what’s claimed in the headline.

That's debatable, given that searching the web is a standard feature of o3.

Fair enough, but searching the web is also a standard feature of humans, but explicitly prohibited when playing GG.

The GeoGuessr Community Rules and Terms and Service strongly imply that users must be people, so we are already conceding that exception to the rules when we want computer systems to compete.

> > Using Google during rounds is technically cheating - I’m unsure about visiting domains you find during the rounds though. It certainly violates the spirit of the game, but it also shows the models are smart enough to use whatever information they can to win

Going off of the source article here, the author at least wasn't clear on whether the rules only prevent using google or if visiting any website is against the rules.

And either way, my point was that the person defining the rules to the LLM was ambiguous. The potential risk of misalignment isn't that a perfect set of rules can't be defined, its that the rules we do define will always be incomplete.

A human can also use the same tools if it wasn't for the rules or fair play. They should've simply redone the test.

The AI should be forced to use the same rules as the human. Not the other way around. The AI shouldn't be using outside resources.

Another rule bans "using third-party software or scripts in order to gain an unfair advantage over other players."

So is it even possible for O3 to beat another player while complying with the rules?

If a player uses such a model, the model is third-party and the player is cheating.

But: when a specific model is itself under test, I would say that during the test it becomes "first" (or second?) party rather than "third".

I think third-party here means not produced by GeoGuesser rather than not produced by the player.

I think that's part of the point they're making, hence "They should've simply redone the test."

An AI being better than a human at doing a google search and then skimming a bunch of pages to find location-related terms isn't as interesting of a result.

How the heck is not? Computers are looking into screenshots and searching the internet to support their "thinking", that's amazing! Have we become so used to AI and what was impossible 6 months ago is shruggable today?

I've being doing this MIND-Dash diet lately and it's amazing I can just take a picture of whatever (nutritional info / ingredients are perfect for that) and just ask if it fits my plan and it tells me back into what bucket it falls, with detailed breakdown of macros in support of some additional goals I have (muscle building for powerlifting). It's amazing! And it does in 2 minutes passively what it would take me 5-10 active search.

Yeah, it's a funny take because this is in fact a more advanced form of AI with autonomous tool use that is just now emerging in 2025. You might say "They could search the web in 2024 too" but that wasn't autonomous on its own, but required telling so or checking a box. This one is piecing ideas together like "Wait, I should Google for this" and that is specifically a new feature for OpenAI o3 that wasn't even in o1.

While it isn't entirely in the spirit of GeoGuesser, it is a good test of the capabilities where being great at GeoGuesser in fact becomes the lesser news here. It will still be if disabling this feature.

I fully expect that someday the news will announce, "The AI appears to be dismantling the moons of Jupiter and turning them into dense, exotic computational devices which it is launching into low solar orbit. We're not sure why. The AI refused to comment."

And someone will post, "Yeah, but that's just computer aideded design and manufacturing. It's not real AI."

The first rule of AI is that the goalposts always move. If a computer can do it, by definition, it isn't "real" AI. This will presumably continue to apply even as the Terminator kicks in the front door.

Yes, but I choose to interpret that as a good thing. It is good that progress is so swift and steady that we can afford to keep moving the goalposts.

Take cars as a random example: progress there isn't fast enough that we keep moving the goalposts for eg fuel economy. (At least not nearly as much.) A car with great fuel economy 20 years ago is today considered at least still good in terms of fuel economy.

And if you account for the makeup of the fleet on the road overall, a great fuel economy car from 1995 (say, a Prizm), still beats the median vehicle on the road, which is certainly an SUV weighing twice as much and gets worse mileage.

In the same way a calculator performing arithmetic faster than humans isn't impressive. The same way running regex over a million lines and the computer beating a human in search isn't impressive

Neither is impressive solely because we've gotten used to them. Both were mind-blowing back in the day.

When it comes to AI - and LLMs in particular - there’s a large cohort of people who seem determined to jump straight from "impossible and will never happen in our lifetime" to "obvious and not impressive", without leaving any time to actually be impressed by the technological achievement. I find that pretty baffling.

I agree, but without removing search you cannot decouple. Has it embedded a regex method and is just leveraging that? Or is it doing something more? Yes, even the regex is still impressive but it is less impressive that doing something more complicated and understanding context and more depth.

I think both are very impressive, world shattering capabilities. Just because they have become normalized doesn't make it any less impressive in my view.

That's a fair point, and I would even agree. Though I think we could agree that it is fair to interpret "impressive" in this context as "surprising". There's lots of really unsurprising things that are incredibly impressive. But I think the general usage of the word here is more akin to surprisal.

That isn't what's happening though. I re-ran those two rounds, this time without search, and it changed nothing. I updated the post with details, you can verify it yourself.

Claiming the AI is just using Google is false and dismissing a truly incredible capability.

But then they couldn't make a click bait title for the article.

I just tried (o4-mini-high) and had it come to the wrong conclusion when I asked about the location and date, because it didn't search the web. I have a photo of a bench with a sign mentioning the cancellation of an event due to the Pope's death. It impressively figured out the location but then decided that Pope Francis is alive and the sign is likely a prank, so the photo is from April Fools day.

Then after I explicitly instructed it to search the web to confirm whether the Pope is alive, it found news of his death and corrected its answer, but it was interesting to see how the LLM makes a mistake due to a major recent event being after its cutoff.

That is truly a macabre and wild idea of an April Fools prank. o4, you’re a monster.

Yeah, the author does note that in the article. He also points it out in the conclusion:

> If it’s using other information to arrive at the guess, then it’s not metadata from the files, but instead web search. It seems likely that in the Austria round, the web search was meaningful, since it mentioned the website named the town itself. It appeared less meaningful in the Ireland round. It was still very capable in the rounds without search.

Seems like they should've just repeated the test. But without the huge point lead from the rounds where it cheated, it wouldn't have looked very impressive at all.

People found the original post so impressive they were saying that it had to be coming from cheating by looking at EXIF data. The point of this article was to show it doesn't. It got an unfair advantage in 1 (and say 0.5) out of 5. With the non-search rounds still doing great.

If you think this is unimpressive, that's subjective so you're entitled to believe that. I think that's awesome.

Sorry, I think I misread you. I think you said

  People accused it of cheating by reading EXIF data. They were wrong, it cheated by using web search. That makes the people that accused it of cheating wrong and this post proves that. 

And is everyone forgetting that what OpenAI shows you during the CoT is not the full CoT? I don't think you can fully rely on that to make claims about when it did and didn't search

That's inaccurate. It beat me by 1,100 points, and given the chain of thought demonstrated that it knew the general region of both guesses before it employed search, it would likely have still beaten me in those rounds. Though probably by fewer points.

I will try it again without web search and update the post though. Still, if you read the chain of thought, it demonstrates remarkable capabilities in all the rounds. It only used search in 2/5 rounds.

I'd be interested at capabilities without web search. The displayed CoT isn't the full CoT so it's hard to know if it really is searching or not. I mean it isn't always obvious when it does. Plus, the things are known to lie ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

I do understand the skepticism, and I'll run it again without search to see what happens.

But a serious question for you: what would you need to see in order to be properly impressed? I ask because I made this post largely to push back on the idea that EXIF data matters and the models aren't that capable. Now the criticism moves to web search, even though it only mattered in one out of five rounds.

What would impress you?

You're kinda being your own worse enemy though.

"Technically cheating"? Why even add the "technically".

It just gives the impression that you're not really objectively looking for any smoke and mirrors by the AI.

I hear you - but I had already read through the chain of thought which identified the right region before search, and had already seen the capabilities in many other rounds. It was self-evident to me that the search wasn't an essential part of the model's capabilities by that point.

Which turned out to be true - I re-ran both of those rounds, without search this time, and the model's guesses were nearly identical. I updated the post with those details.

I feel like I did enough to prove that o3's geolocation abilities aren't smoke and mirrors, and I tried to be very transparent about it all too. Do you disagree? What more could I do to show this objectively?

  > What would impress you?

I want to be clear that you tainted the capacity to impress me by the clickbait title. I don't think it was through malice, but I hope you realize the title is deceptive.[0] (Even though I use strong language, I do want to clarify I don't think it is malice)

To paraphrase from my comment: if you oversell and under deliver, people feel cheated, even if the deliverable is revolutionary.

So I think you might have the wrong framing to achieve this goal. I am actually a bit impressed by O3's capabilities. But at the same time you set the bar high and didn't go over or meet it. So that's going to really hinder the ability to impress. On the other hand, you set the bar low, it usually becomes easy to. It i slike when you have low expectations for a movie and it's mediocre you still feel good, right?

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43836791

I did repeat the test without search, and updated the post. It made no difference. Details here:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43837832

The question is not only how much it helped the AI model but rather how much it would have helped the human.

This is because the AI model could have chosen to run a search whenever it wanted (e.g. perhaps if it knew how to leverage search better, it could have used it more).

In order for the results to be meaningful, the competitors have to play by the same rules.

>isn't playing fair.

the idea of having nth more dimensions of information, readable and ingestible within a short frame of time probably isn't either.

Isn't it? We totally accept this fact for humans. Some people are just insane at memorization. We don't call unfair that they use this to their advantage compared to someone who doesn't have that talent.

As models continue to evolve it may not even need to cheat.

Since web scale data is already part of pre-training this info is in principle available for most businesses without a web search.

The exceptions would be if it’s recently added, or doesn’t appear often enough to generate a significant signal during training, as in this case with a really small business.

It’s not hard to imagine base model knowledge improving to the point where it’s still performing at almost the same level without any web search needed.

Using the decal as a clue is funny because what if there was a street scene where that happened to be misleading? For example, I had seen that a Sacramento County Sheriff car got to Europe and I guess it now belonged to a member of the public who is driving it with the original decals still attached. I wonder how the LLM would reason if it sees the car as “out of place”.

Probabilities. That could happen with anything. Someone could build a classic japanese house with a japanese garden in Hawaii. But Japan is probably a better guess if you see a japanese house with japanese fauna.

Flora, not fauna

True

Stands to reason a human might get fooled by this as well

Absolutely!

It happens occasionally - the most common example I can think of it getting a license plate or other location from a tractor-trailer (semi) on the highway. Those are very unreliable.

You also sometimes get flags in the wrong countries, immigrants showing their native pride or even embassies.

It is against the rules? I thought it's all fair game, but you are time constrained

Yes: https://www.geoguessr.com/community-rules

But if anything, those rules benefit ChatGPT: it can remember ~all of Wikipedia and translate ~every language on Earth, while a human would need access to online services for that.

If anything, I'd think allowing looking stuff up would benefit human players over ChatGPT (though humans are probably much slower at it, so they probably lose on time).

If it takes a model and database with a large chunk of the internet to compete and win, then that says something, as that's much more expensive and complex than just the model, because models have problems "remembering" correctly just like people.

It's important to have fair and equivalent testing not because that allows people to win, but because it shows where the strengths and weaknesses of people and current AI actually are in a useful way.

Connecting an LLM to the web or database is something cheap, not something expensive.

I'm not sure how to make sense of this in the context of what we're discussing. Access to the web is exactly what's in question, and emulating the internet to a degree you don't actually need to access it to have the information is very expensive in resources because of how massive the dataset is, which is the point I was making.

Same with a human.

Why was this downvoted? It's a fair question and it wasn't stated as fact.

Because an accepted answer to that specific question is invariably a link/reference that the asker could have searched for (and posted if they think it's useful for the discussion) themselves directly, instead of putting that burden on the rest of us and amortizing everyone's attention. It's entitled and lazy.

To be fair, my local copy of R1 isn't doing any searching at all, but it frequently says "A search suggests..." or something along the lines.

the title really doesn't suit the content of the article

While technically you're right about the rules of GeoGuessr as a game, I think this misses the more interesting and potentially concerning implications.

IMO, whether or not it's "cheating" at GeoGuessr is less important than what this capability represents: an AI system that can extract specific details from images, determine what's significant, and use that information to precisely locate a photo. That's impressive regardless of method.

The implications extend far beyond the game. Consider its potential use in automating OSINT tasks. An AI agent running o3 could analyze publicly posted photos (e.g., on Twitter, Instagram), identify locations from background details, and aggregate this data. Within an hour or two, this could build a detailed location profile (home, work, frequented places) for an individual - something that previously required considerable manual effort and expertise. While human analysis would likely still be needed, this significantly lowers the barrier for large-scale analysis.

This ability to extract location clues from images - whether shop names, signs, or landscapes - has significant real-world implications, particularly for automating OSINT tasks. The potential for large-scale location analysis from public photos is the more profound point, regardless of whether one specific method breaks game rules. That capability is what deserves attention.

I think the main concern that anyone can upload your picture and locate your address, at a low cost.

I use web search and still can't get a perfect score. Without it, I wouldn't be able to find anything. (I don't play competitively obviously; and just my free 3 tries per day.)