Scott Alexander at Astral Codex Ten:
Last week, Kelsey Piper claimed that o3 – OpenAI’s latest ChatGPT model – could achieve seemingly impossible feats in GeoGuessr. She gave it this picture:
…and with no further questions, it determined the exact location (Marina State Beach, Monterey, CA).
How? She linked a transcript where o3 tried to explain its reasoning, but the explanation isn’t very good. It said things like:
Tan sand, medium surf, sparse foredune, U.S.-style kite motif, frequent overcast in winter … Sand hue and grain size match many California state-park beaches. California’s winter marine layer often produces exactly this thick, even gray sky.
Commenters suggested that it was lying. Maybe there was hidden metadata in the image, or o3 remembered where Kelsey lived from previous conversations, or it traced her IP, or it cheated some other way.
I decided to test the limits of this phenomenon.
More here.
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