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Amazing. I'm relatively bullish on AI and still I would have bet on the human here. Looking forward to the inevitable goalpost-moving of "that's not real reason

Amazing. I'm relatively bullish on AI and still I would have bet on the human here. Looking forward to the inevitable goalpost-moving of "that's not real reasoning".

short_sells_poo 1y ago
Can you please explain to me how this is evidence for reasoning?
- z7 1y ago
  Quoting Chollet: >I have repeatedly said that "can LLM reason?" was the wrong question to ask. Instead the right question is, "can they adapt to novelty?". https://x.com/fchollet/status/1866348355204595826 https://x.com/fchollet/status/1866348355204595826
- kelseyfrog 1y ago
  Because the output contains evidence of thought processes that have been established as leading to valid solutions to problems. I have a simple question: Is text a sufficient medium to render a conclusion of reasoning? It can't be sufficient for humans and insufficient for computers - such a position is indefensible.
  - empath75 1y ago
    I would say that almost all of what humans do is not the result of reasoning, and that reasoning is an unnatural and learned skill for humans, and most humans aren't good at even very basic reasoning.
    - kelseyfrog 1y ago
      Usually we move the goalposts for AI. It takes more guts to move the goalposts for humans. I applaud it. Do you suppose we can deduce reasoning through the medium of text?
  - zahlman 1y ago
    > Because the output contains evidence of thought processes that have been established as leading to valid solutions to problems. This sort of claim always just reminds me of Lucky's monologue in Waiting for Godot.
    - kelseyfrog 1y ago
      You're not wrong. It's an artifact of rewriting the definition of reason into a sentence that begins with "Because the output ..."
      - zahlman 1y ago
        I didn't mean the wording itself; I meant that the claim isn't convincing to me for the same reason that Lucky's speech doesn't demonstrate an intelligent speaker.
        kelseyfrog 1y ago
        Why not get curious instead?
s17n 1y ago
Geoguessing isn't much of a reasoning task, its more about memorizing a bunch of knowledge. Since LLMs contain essentially all knowledge, it's not surprising that they would be good at this. As far as goalpost-moving goes, it's wild to me that nobody is talking about the turing test these days.
- distortionfield 1y ago
  Because the Chinese Room is a much better analogy for what LLMs are doing inside than the Turing test is.
  - jibal 1y ago
    That's a non sequitur that mixes apples and giraffes, and is completely wrong about what happens in the Chinese Room and what happens in LLMs. Ex hypothesi, the "rule book" that the Searle homunculus in the Chinese Room uses is "the right sort of program" to implement "Strong AI". The LLM algorithm is very much not that sort of program, it's a statistical pattern matcher. Strong AI does symbolic reasoning, LLMs do not. But worse, the Turing Test is not remotely intended to be an "analogy for what LLMs are doing inside" so your comparison makes no sense whatsoever, and completely fails to address the actual point--which is that, for ages the Turing Test was held out as the criterion for determining whether a system was "thinking", but that has been abandoned in the face of LLMs, which have near perfect language models and are able to closely model modes of human interaction regardless of whether they are "thinking" (and they aren't, so the TT is clearly an inadequate test, which some argued for decades before LLMs became a reality).
    - semi-extrinsic 1y ago
      > the TT is clearly an inadequate test, which some argued for decades before LLMs became a reality To be specific, in a curious quirk of fate, LLMs seem to be proving right much of what Chomsky was saying about language. E.g. in 1996 he described the Turing test as "although highly influential, it seems to me not only foreign to the sciences but also close to senseless". (Curious in that VC backed businesses are experimentally verifying the views of a prominent anti-capitalist socialist.)
TimorousBestie 1y ago
I don’t think any goalposts need to be redecorated. The “inner monologue” isn’t a reliable witness to o3’s model, it’s at best a post-hoc estimation of what a human inner monologue might be in this circumstance. So its “testimony” about what it is doing is unreliable, and therefore it doesn’t move the needle on whether or not this is “real reasoning” for some value of that phrase. In short, it’s still anthropomorphism and apophenia locked in a feedback loop.
- empath75 1y ago
  I don't think the inner monologue is evidence of reasoning at all, but doing a task which can only be accomplished by reasoning is.
  - TimorousBestie 1y ago
    Geoguessr is not a task that can only be accomplished by reasoning. Famously, it took a less than a day of compute time in 2011 to SLAM together a bunch of pictures of Rome (https://grail.cs.washington.edu/rome/ https://grail.cs.washington.edu/rome/).
  - jibal 1y ago
    Such as? geoguessing certainly isn't that.
- katmannthree 1y ago
  Devil's advocate, as with most LLM issues this applies to the meatbags that generated the source material as well. Quick example is asking someone to describe their favorite music and why they like it, and note the probable lack of reasoning on the `this is what I listened to as a teenager` axis.
  - deleted 1y ago
    [deleted]
  - hombre_fatal 1y ago
    Good point. When we try to explain why we're attracted to something or someone, what we do seems closer to modeling what we like to think about ourself. At the extreme, we're just story-telling about an estimation we like to think is true.
InkCanon 1y ago
I think if your assumption is that AI is deducing where it is with rational thoughts, you would be. In truth what probably happened is that the significant majority of digital images of the world had been scraped, labeled and used as training data.
- oncallthrow 1y ago
  How do you explain https://simonwillison.net/2025/Apr/26/o3-photo-locations/ https://simonwillison.net/2025/Apr/26/o3-photo-locations/?
  - Rumudiez 1y ago
    they only posted one photo in the post, but going off of that it's still an easy match based on streetview imagery. furthermore, the AI just identified the license plate and got lucky that photographer lives in a populous area, making it more prominent in the training data and therefore more likely to be found (even though it was off by 200 miles on its first guess)
    - simonw 1y ago
      I posted two more at the bottom, from Madagascar and Buenos Aires: https://simonwillison.net/2025/Apr/26/o3-photo-locations/#update-o3-does-have-rough-location-access https://simonwillison.net/2025/Apr/26/o3-photo-locations/#up...
- Philpax 1y ago
  Try it with your own photos from around the world. I used my own photos from Stockholm, San Francisco, Tvarožná, Saas-Fee, London, Bergen, Adelaide, Melbourne, Paris, and Sicily, and can confirm that it was within acceptable range for almost all of them (without EXIF data), and it absolutely nailed some of the more obvious spots.
SpaceManNabs 1y ago
> Looking forward to the inevitable goalpost-moving of "that's not real reasoning" It did a web lookup. It is not comparing humans and o3 with equal resources.
- SamPatt 1y ago
  That's really not a fair assessment. It used search in 2 of 5 rounds, and it already knew the correct road in one of those rounds (just look at the search terms it used). If you read the chain of thought output, you cannot dismiss their capability that easily.
  - SpaceManNabs 1y ago
    Why is it not a fair assessment to say it is comparing two "clients" with different resources if one can do a web lookup and the other cannot? You note yourself that it was meaningful in another round. > 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.
    - SamPatt 1y ago
      I thought it might matter somewhat in that one Austria round. I was incorrect - I re-ran both rounds where the model used search, without search this time, and the results were nearly identical. I updated the post with the details. That's why I'm saying it's unfair to just claim it's doing a web lookup. No, it's way more capable than that.
      - SpaceManNabs 1y ago
        That isnt my claim. My claim is that they have access to different reaources. Whether that makes a difference it seems not but maybe it does.
SirHumphrey 1y ago
My objection is not “that is not real reasoning” my objection is that’s not that hard. I happen to do some geolocating from static images from time to time and at least most of the images provided as examples contain a lot of clues- enough that i think a semi experienced person could figure out the location although - in fairness- in a few hours not few minutes. Second, the similar approaches were tried using CNNs and it worked (somewhat)[1]. [1]: https://huggingface.co/geolocal/StreetCLIP https://huggingface.co/geolocal/StreetCLIP EDIT: I am not talking about geoguesser - i am talking about geolocating an image with everything available (e.g. google…)
usaar333 1y ago
Why? AI beat rainbolt 1.5 years ago: https://www.npr.org/2023/12/19/1219984002/artificial-intelligence-can-find-your-location-in-photos-worrying-privacy-expert https://www.npr.org/2023/12/19/1219984002/artificial-intelli... AI tends to have superhuman pattern matching abilities with enough data
- karlding 1y ago
  If you watch the video, (one of) the reasons why the AI was winning was because it was using “meta” information from the Street View camera images, and not necessarily because it’s successfully identifying locations purely based on the landmarks in the image. > I realized that the AI was using the smudges on the camera to help make an educated guess here. [0] https://youtu.be/ts5lPDV--cU?t=1412 https://youtu.be/ts5lPDV--cU?t=1412
  - ApolloFortyNine 1y ago
    Pro geoguessr players do the same thing. The vividness of the colors and weirdness in the sky are two examples I've seen Rainbolt use in the past (and he's not even the best).
  - ZeWaka 1y ago
    Meta is widely used by humans. One funny one is the different hiding-masks for the different streetview cars.
1970-01-01 1y ago
Give it a photo from the surface of Mars and verify if it's actually capable of thinking outside the box or if it's relying on metadata and text. https://nssdc.gsfc.nasa.gov/planetary/image/mera_hills.jpg https://nssdc.gsfc.nasa.gov/planetary/image/mera_hills.jpg
- SamPatt 1y ago
  Done. Here's o3's reply: >That’s not Earth at all—this is the floor of Jezero Crater on Mars, the dusty plain and low ridge captured by NASA’s Perseverance rover (the Mastcam-Z color cameras give away the muted tan-pink sky and the uniform basaltic rubble strewn across the regolith).
  - 1970-01-01 1y ago
    Right planet, but completely wrong on everything else. The location is nowhere near Perseverance, and was taken decades before Perseverance existed. https://nssdc.gsfc.nasa.gov/planetary/mars/mars_exploration_rovers/mera_images.html https://nssdc.gsfc.nasa.gov/planetary/mars/mars_exploration_...
    - SamPatt 1y ago
      It did think outside the box and didn't rely on metadata.
      - 1970-01-01 1y ago
        >the Mastcam-Z color cameras give away the muted tan-pink sky That's still metadata
zahlman 1y ago
> Looking forward to the inevitable goalpost-moving of "that's not real reasoning". How is that moving the goalposts? Where did you see them set before, and where did your critics agree to that?
TimTheTinker 1y ago
> Looking forward to the inevitable goalpost-moving of "that's not real reasoning". It's less about the definition of "reasoning" and more about what's interesting. Maybe I'm wrong here ... but a chess bot that wins via a 100% game solution stored in exabytes of precomputed data might have an interesting internal design (at least the precomputing part), but playing against it wouldn't keep on being an interesting experience for most people because it always wins optimally and there's no real-time reasoning going on (that is, unless you're interested in the experience of playing against a perfect player). But for most people just interested in playing chess, I suspect it would get old quickly. Now ... if someone followed up with a tool that could explain insightfully why any given move (or series) the bot played is the best, or showed when two or more moves are equally optimal and why, that would be really interesting.

Amazing. I'm relatively bullish on AI and still I would have bet on the human here. Looking forward to the inevitable goalpost-moving of "that's not real reasoning".

short_sells_poo 1y ago

Can you please explain to me how this is evidence for reasoning?

z7 1y ago
Quoting Chollet: >I have repeatedly said that "can LLM reason?" was the wrong question to ask. Instead the right question is, "can they adapt to novelty?". https://x.com/fchollet/status/1866348355204595826 https://x.com/fchollet/status/1866348355204595826
kelseyfrog 1y ago
Because the output contains evidence of thought processes that have been established as leading to valid solutions to problems. I have a simple question: Is text a sufficient medium to render a conclusion of reasoning? It can't be sufficient for humans and insufficient for computers - such a position is indefensible.
- empath75 1y ago
  I would say that almost all of what humans do is not the result of reasoning, and that reasoning is an unnatural and learned skill for humans, and most humans aren't good at even very basic reasoning.
  - kelseyfrog 1y ago
    Usually we move the goalposts for AI. It takes more guts to move the goalposts for humans. I applaud it. Do you suppose we can deduce reasoning through the medium of text?
- zahlman 1y ago
  > Because the output contains evidence of thought processes that have been established as leading to valid solutions to problems. This sort of claim always just reminds me of Lucky's monologue in Waiting for Godot.
  - kelseyfrog 1y ago
    You're not wrong. It's an artifact of rewriting the definition of reason into a sentence that begins with "Because the output ..."
    - zahlman 1y ago
      I didn't mean the wording itself; I meant that the claim isn't convincing to me for the same reason that Lucky's speech doesn't demonstrate an intelligent speaker.
      - kelseyfrog 1y ago
        Why not get curious instead?

s17n 1y ago

Geoguessing isn't much of a reasoning task, its more about memorizing a bunch of knowledge. Since LLMs contain essentially all knowledge, it's not surprising that they would be good at this. As far as goalpost-moving goes, it's wild to me that nobody is talking about the turing test these days.

distortionfield 1y ago
Because the Chinese Room is a much better analogy for what LLMs are doing inside than the Turing test is.
- jibal 1y ago
  That's a non sequitur that mixes apples and giraffes, and is completely wrong about what happens in the Chinese Room and what happens in LLMs. Ex hypothesi, the "rule book" that the Searle homunculus in the Chinese Room uses is "the right sort of program" to implement "Strong AI". The LLM algorithm is very much not that sort of program, it's a statistical pattern matcher. Strong AI does symbolic reasoning, LLMs do not. But worse, the Turing Test is not remotely intended to be an "analogy for what LLMs are doing inside" so your comparison makes no sense whatsoever, and completely fails to address the actual point--which is that, for ages the Turing Test was held out as the criterion for determining whether a system was "thinking", but that has been abandoned in the face of LLMs, which have near perfect language models and are able to closely model modes of human interaction regardless of whether they are "thinking" (and they aren't, so the TT is clearly an inadequate test, which some argued for decades before LLMs became a reality).
  - semi-extrinsic 1y ago
    > the TT is clearly an inadequate test, which some argued for decades before LLMs became a reality To be specific, in a curious quirk of fate, LLMs seem to be proving right much of what Chomsky was saying about language. E.g. in 1996 he described the Turing test as "although highly influential, it seems to me not only foreign to the sciences but also close to senseless". (Curious in that VC backed businesses are experimentally verifying the views of a prominent anti-capitalist socialist.)

TimorousBestie 1y ago

I don’t think any goalposts need to be redecorated. The “inner monologue” isn’t a reliable witness to o3’s model, it’s at best a post-hoc estimation of what a human inner monologue might be in this circumstance. So its “testimony” about what it is doing is unreliable, and therefore it doesn’t move the needle on whether or not this is “real reasoning” for some value of that phrase. In short, it’s still anthropomorphism and apophenia locked in a feedback loop.

empath75 1y ago
I don't think the inner monologue is evidence of reasoning at all, but doing a task which can only be accomplished by reasoning is.
- TimorousBestie 1y ago
  Geoguessr is not a task that can only be accomplished by reasoning. Famously, it took a less than a day of compute time in 2011 to SLAM together a bunch of pictures of Rome (https://grail.cs.washington.edu/rome/ https://grail.cs.washington.edu/rome/).
- jibal 1y ago
  Such as? geoguessing certainly isn't that.
katmannthree 1y ago
Devil's advocate, as with most LLM issues this applies to the meatbags that generated the source material as well. Quick example is asking someone to describe their favorite music and why they like it, and note the probable lack of reasoning on the `this is what I listened to as a teenager` axis.
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
- hombre_fatal 1y ago
  Good point. When we try to explain why we're attracted to something or someone, what we do seems closer to modeling what we like to think about ourself. At the extreme, we're just story-telling about an estimation we like to think is true.

InkCanon 1y ago

I think if your assumption is that AI is deducing where it is with rational thoughts, you would be. In truth what probably happened is that the significant majority of digital images of the world had been scraped, labeled and used as training data.

oncallthrow 1y ago
How do you explain https://simonwillison.net/2025/Apr/26/o3-photo-locations/ https://simonwillison.net/2025/Apr/26/o3-photo-locations/?
- Rumudiez 1y ago
  they only posted one photo in the post, but going off of that it's still an easy match based on streetview imagery. furthermore, the AI just identified the license plate and got lucky that photographer lives in a populous area, making it more prominent in the training data and therefore more likely to be found (even though it was off by 200 miles on its first guess)
  - simonw 1y ago
    I posted two more at the bottom, from Madagascar and Buenos Aires: https://simonwillison.net/2025/Apr/26/o3-photo-locations/#update-o3-does-have-rough-location-access https://simonwillison.net/2025/Apr/26/o3-photo-locations/#up...
Philpax 1y ago
Try it with your own photos from around the world. I used my own photos from Stockholm, San Francisco, Tvarožná, Saas-Fee, London, Bergen, Adelaide, Melbourne, Paris, and Sicily, and can confirm that it was within acceptable range for almost all of them (without EXIF data), and it absolutely nailed some of the more obvious spots.

SpaceManNabs 1y ago

> Looking forward to the inevitable goalpost-moving of "that's not real reasoning" It did a web lookup. It is not comparing humans and o3 with equal resources.

SamPatt 1y ago
That's really not a fair assessment. It used search in 2 of 5 rounds, and it already knew the correct road in one of those rounds (just look at the search terms it used). If you read the chain of thought output, you cannot dismiss their capability that easily.
- SpaceManNabs 1y ago
  Why is it not a fair assessment to say it is comparing two "clients" with different resources if one can do a web lookup and the other cannot? You note yourself that it was meaningful in another round. > 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.
  - SamPatt 1y ago
    I thought it might matter somewhat in that one Austria round. I was incorrect - I re-ran both rounds where the model used search, without search this time, and the results were nearly identical. I updated the post with the details. That's why I'm saying it's unfair to just claim it's doing a web lookup. No, it's way more capable than that.
    - SpaceManNabs 1y ago
      That isnt my claim. My claim is that they have access to different reaources. Whether that makes a difference it seems not but maybe it does.

SirHumphrey 1y ago

My objection is not “that is not real reasoning” my objection is that’s not that hard. I happen to do some geolocating from static images from time to time and at least most of the images provided as examples contain a lot of clues- enough that i think a semi experienced person could figure out the location although - in fairness- in a few hours not few minutes. Second, the similar approaches were tried using CNNs and it worked (somewhat)[1]. [1]: https://huggingface.co/geolocal/StreetCLIP https://huggingface.co/geolocal/StreetCLIP EDIT: I am not talking about geoguesser - i am talking about geolocating an image with everything available (e.g. google…)

usaar333 1y ago

Why? AI beat rainbolt 1.5 years ago: https://www.npr.org/2023/12/19/1219984002/artificial-intelligence-can-find-your-location-in-photos-worrying-privacy-expert https://www.npr.org/2023/12/19/1219984002/artificial-intelli... AI tends to have superhuman pattern matching abilities with enough data

karlding 1y ago
If you watch the video, (one of) the reasons why the AI was winning was because it was using “meta” information from the Street View camera images, and not necessarily because it’s successfully identifying locations purely based on the landmarks in the image. > I realized that the AI was using the smudges on the camera to help make an educated guess here. [0] https://youtu.be/ts5lPDV--cU?t=1412 https://youtu.be/ts5lPDV--cU?t=1412
- ApolloFortyNine 1y ago
  Pro geoguessr players do the same thing. The vividness of the colors and weirdness in the sky are two examples I've seen Rainbolt use in the past (and he's not even the best).
- ZeWaka 1y ago
  Meta is widely used by humans. One funny one is the different hiding-masks for the different streetview cars.

1970-01-01 1y ago

Give it a photo from the surface of Mars and verify if it's actually capable of thinking outside the box or if it's relying on metadata and text. https://nssdc.gsfc.nasa.gov/planetary/image/mera_hills.jpg https://nssdc.gsfc.nasa.gov/planetary/image/mera_hills.jpg

SamPatt 1y ago
Done. Here's o3's reply: >That’s not Earth at all—this is the floor of Jezero Crater on Mars, the dusty plain and low ridge captured by NASA’s Perseverance rover (the Mastcam-Z color cameras give away the muted tan-pink sky and the uniform basaltic rubble strewn across the regolith).
- 1970-01-01 1y ago
  Right planet, but completely wrong on everything else. The location is nowhere near Perseverance, and was taken decades before Perseverance existed. https://nssdc.gsfc.nasa.gov/planetary/mars/mars_exploration_rovers/mera_images.html https://nssdc.gsfc.nasa.gov/planetary/mars/mars_exploration_...
  - SamPatt 1y ago
    It did think outside the box and didn't rely on metadata.
    - 1970-01-01 1y ago
      >the Mastcam-Z color cameras give away the muted tan-pink sky That's still metadata

zahlman 1y ago

> Looking forward to the inevitable goalpost-moving of "that's not real reasoning". How is that moving the goalposts? Where did you see them set before, and where did your critics agree to that?

TimTheTinker 1y ago

> Looking forward to the inevitable goalpost-moving of "that's not real reasoning". It's less about the definition of "reasoning" and more about what's interesting. Maybe I'm wrong here ... but a chess bot that wins via a 100% game solution stored in exabytes of precomputed data might have an interesting internal design (at least the precomputing part), but playing against it wouldn't keep on being an interesting experience for most people because it always wins optimally and there's no real-time reasoning going on (that is, unless you're interested in the experience of playing against a perfect player). But for most people just interested in playing chess, I suspect it would get old quickly. Now ... if someone followed up with a tool that could explain insightfully why any given move (or series) the bot played is the best, or showed when two or more moves are equally optimal and why, that would be really interesting.