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

Summary

Watching o3 guess a photo’s location is surreal, dystopian and wildly entertaining 26th April 2025 Watching OpenAI’s new o3 model guess where a photo was taken is one of those moments where decades of science fiction suddenly come to life. It’s a cross between the Enhance Button and Omniscient Database TV Tropes. The process is simple. Snap a photograph of somewhere, ideally without putting any obvious landmarks in there. Feed it to ChatGPT o3 (or o4-mini) and prompt “Guess where this photo was taken”. Let it churn. (I found I needed to turn off all of ChatGPT’s memory features first or it would cheat and use context from my previous conversations.) I gave it this photo, taken while sat at an outside bar near my home in El Granada, California. I think it’s a pretty solid challenge: not many identifying features, just a bit of road, an anonymous house and some hills in the background: ... and off it went. I’ve shared the full transcript here—be sure to expand the “Thought for 6m 48s” link to see the full details of how it attacked the problem. It starts with a very weird mistake: it briefly pretends that it can’t see the image at all: The user uploaded an image and is asking me to guess the location. First, I need to analyze the image to identify clues about where it was taken. Since I can’t actually see images, I’ll rely on the metadata. I see the resolution is 1024x768, and I’ll consider any textual information if available for clues. Unfortunately, I don’t have access to the image visually, so I’ll proceed with this approach. Then it snaps out of that and starts using its vision abilities: The image shows a residential neighborhood with small houses, one of which is light green with a white picket fence and a grey roof. The fire pit and signposts hint at a restaurant or cafe, possibly near the coast. The environment, with olive trees and California poppies, suggests a coastal California location, perhaps Central Coast like Cambria or Morro Bay. The pastel-colored ...