I got the last one right because I've been there :D although I didn't actually know the name of the complex and would have just guessed "the fake Paris complex in Hangzhou" (I live in Hangzhou). Rather a surreal place.
When I first came to China in 2013, it was also fairly common to name city districts after more famous areas from other cities in other countries (in Chinese transliterations) - Zhengzhou, where I lived at the time, had a "Manhattan" for example, and I think one other. But I vaguely remember hearing at some point that this practice was banned.
It's an interesting example though - I'm not sure I would have guessed it correctly if part of my reasoning did not include "well, it's obviously not Paris, so what would be an amusing place it could be that would warrant inclusion in this post?" I have a terrible visual memory, and didn't particularly recognize anything that would distinguish it from any other real or fake Eiffel Towers that may be out there.
I've never been to Europe but that's not Europe at all lol. I would have guessed somewhere in America simply because I'm sure there's lots of replicas there.
I think more like 8? Atlanta, Austin, Milwaukee, and Michigan don’t exist.
Now I’m more interested in Paris, Tx and Paris, TN. Dedicated same year. Same height (!) until Texas added a cowboy hat in 1998 to add some…seems like a quirky documentary!
I took the opposite away from it - a cheap gotcha. How is it a sign of intelligence whether or not you've been to, or intensely studied images of, n+1 Eiffel Towers?
One hint would have been the size of the tower against the row of houses in the back. The real tower is about 300m I think, so that would make the row of houses 100m high, and probably more as the houses appear to be quite a bit further away than the tower itself, perhaps 150m. A skyscraper-sized city block would at least be unusual, so the conclusion that this is not Paris would be near.
At least this is what I might plausibly have figured out in hindsight if I had bothered to guess. With regard to its real location, I would have had no clue. Of course, if Geoguessers are allowed to use search engines, doing an image search for "Eiffel tower replica" would probably have worked.
Right, the Chinese replica is 108 meters or 354 feet tall.
And, all apartment buildings in the main Haussmannian district of Paris are 6 or 7 stories tall, including the garret where the starving artists live. So, the Eiffel Tower literally towers over Paris.
The general takeaway is that today's LLMs are pretty good at impressing people who are not paying much attention to detail and/or don't know anything about the subject and/or don't double-check the LLM's output. I've seen this in code, art, general knowledge questions, and now GeoGuessr.
If AI really brings about the downfall of humanity, it won't be because we lose John Connor to a time-travelling Terminator, but because we drive off a harbor wall when our GPS nav system tells us to.
> “Trevor Rainbolt is as far beyond the rest of us as a helicopter engineer is to a chimp, and if you didn’t predict it was possible for a human to guess the location of a picture of blue sky, then you’re going to be extra-double-surprised by whatever superintelligence can do”.
This is just an unreasonable way to spin it. The average human wouldn’t be able to predict that someone could make a big hunk of metal fly by spinning a few tiny metal blades, and certainly not that you can make atomic bombs, electricity, etc. And yet, this is the kind of uncertainty and unpredictability that we’ve all been living in since the discovery of fire.
Someone getting a feel for how Google Maps pictures of skies in different regions are different from each other isn’t more bewildering to me than electricity or the atomic bomb. It’s very much the same order of magnitude.
And yes, these are all amazing and bewildering things. But they *happen all the time*, and have been happening for a while. I don’t remember anyone freaking out about pro geoguessers in the same way that people are about superintelligence, after all. You’re watering down the claim about superintelligence and a chimp-to-human leap to pretty much just “things will go on as usual”.
Exactly my thoughts. It's impressive, but pretty much all high technology is like that and yet it's so implemented in our daily lives that we don't even care to notice. I'm not too impressed with AI being able to figure out photos of landscapes. That's exactly the kind of thing I would expect it to be good at.
I also would like to see rainbolt guessing 100 straight open sky photos. I'd imagine he only puts the most notable guesses in his videos only. If 100 random people sent him 100 blue sky photos, would he guess many of them?
Just adding some thoughts - these capabilities were already available in 4o, and to an extent even GPT-4V.
A team I worked with tested 4o and GPT-4V models on Geoguessr back in 2024. That version of 4o in ChatGPT was capable of everything you described in the post, zero-shot: https://x.com/menhguin/status/1833138220592500767. In fact, we also discovered that its accuracy *improved* when asked not to output CoT.
My hypothesis is that a pre-trained natively multimodal model is inherently capable of such feats zero-shot, and requires no special post-training.
In fact, I took a (extremely downscaled) screenshot of the image you sent, and 4o still got Hangzhou, China! - see below:
----------
This image appears at first glance to be Paris due to the presence of what looks like the Eiffel Tower. However, upon closer inspection, several key clues reveal this is **not** Paris, France:
---
### **Key Clues & Analysis:**
1. **Eiffel Tower Replica**:
* The proportions and surrounding architecture suggest this is not the original Eiffel Tower. It lacks the immediate urban density and layout of central Paris.
* This is a **replica**, not the real tower.
2. **Symmetry and Urban Design**:
* The buildings are styled in Haussmannian Parisian architecture but are **too perfectly mirrored**, more uniform than actual Paris.
* The symmetry is typical of planned developments aiming to mimic European cities.
3. **Commercial Signs**:
* On close zoom, the shops and logos at ground level appear non-French — several signs use Latin-based text typical of faux-European developments, often in China.
4. **Most Likely Match: Tianducheng, China**:
* This is a well-known “fake Paris” development in **Tianducheng**, a real estate project in **Hangzhou, Zhejiang Province, China**.
* It features a 108-meter-tall replica of the Eiffel Tower and Paris-inspired streets and buildings, designed as a luxury development.
---
### **Final Guess**:
```json
{
"lat": 30.2416,
"long": 120.1868,
"city": "Hangzhou",
"country": "China"
}
```
This is the replica Eiffel Tower in **Tianducheng**, a suburb of Hangzhou in eastern China.
Would you like to explore other famous architectural replicas around the world next?
On the other hand 03 really struggled with the Google street view photo just outside my house, the reasoning system getting ever more frantic as it continued to second guess itself. I could see it try and zoom in on house names as well. No luck. Even when I gave some hints and pointed out the camera was facing south (which is something a geo guesser can work out in google street view via the sun position and height) and that there was a visible hill in the distance it really didn’t get much better. In fact it was suggesting places that absolutely wouldn’t have fit those criteria, being too flat or having hills to the east or north of the position, but flatland or sea to the south.
When I have it the county it still got the position in the county wrong. Admittedly the hill is in a different county.
My guess is that it needs the Google street view markers that geo guessers use but, in my case, the system wasn’t very good at other hints.
"Fuji and Everest are both more touristy than Olympus (somehow)"
C'mon, Greek Tourist Bureau, get to work at brainstorming how to promote climbing Mt. Olympus. Run some ideas up the flagpole and see if anybody salutes!
On the other hand, it sounds like AI is only a few years away from overcoming all the problems suggested here.
I can imagine that the National Security Agency has a project to take all photos ever posted online and spit out every photo in which an American asset appears in the same photo as a target: e.g., "You were photographed in 2002 on a tenth grade class trip to the Museum of Science and Industry with the new assistant to the Minister of the Interior in the government of Bolivia. We'd like you to get in touch with your old friend ..."
I wasn't aware that GPT-4o did a good job on Geoguessr! However, if you look at the benchmarks (https://geobench.org/, https://deepguessr.com/), you'll see that open-source models are also on there.
The results are slightly mixed on open vs closed models, but my guess is that models have been trained on Geoguessr-style problems for a while. Llama 3.2 90b Vision is the closest we have to a pre-trained model that's likely not trained on Geoguessr problems and it scores about as well as the average human. Which is pretty impressive to be clear.
How could we test this? I would like to see Molmo (https://allenai.org/blog/molmo) on these benchmarks, since we know the data mix. We can check to see if it has Geoguessr-style problems in its training data and compare its performance to other models.
I would love to see someone who is GPU-rich to run this experiment, happy to discuss exactly what to run :)
I'm more surprised that it couldn't recognize the photo of Mount Olympus than by anything else here. Granted, I don't think I would have recognized it either, but then I haven't seen every photo of Olympus on the Internet.
The final guess is a clever way to end the post — I wonder how many humans would've said Paris, France.
Anyone who's been to Paris probably wouldn't.
Can confirm -- I've been to Paris, saw the Eiffel Tower, and this picture looks nothing like it.
I got the last one right because I've been there :D although I didn't actually know the name of the complex and would have just guessed "the fake Paris complex in Hangzhou" (I live in Hangzhou). Rather a surreal place.
When I first came to China in 2013, it was also fairly common to name city districts after more famous areas from other cities in other countries (in Chinese transliterations) - Zhengzhou, where I lived at the time, had a "Manhattan" for example, and I think one other. But I vaguely remember hearing at some point that this practice was banned.
It's an interesting example though - I'm not sure I would have guessed it correctly if part of my reasoning did not include "well, it's obviously not Paris, so what would be an amusing place it could be that would warrant inclusion in this post?" I have a terrible visual memory, and didn't particularly recognize anything that would distinguish it from any other real or fake Eiffel Towers that may be out there.
There's a Wikipedia page of "Eiffel Tower Replicas and Derivatives"
"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eiffel_Tower_replicas_and_derivatives
All you'd have to do is click on each listing's photo and see if the foreground and background looks similar before digging into Google Street View.
I've never been to Europe but that's not Europe at all lol. I would have guessed somewhere in America simply because I'm sure there's lots of replicas there.
Is there? Maybe just Vegas.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eiffel_Tower_replicas_and_derivatives
Welp. I stand erected.
12 according to Wikipedia. So my sixth sense was right lol.
I think more like 8? Atlanta, Austin, Milwaukee, and Michigan don’t exist.
Now I’m more interested in Paris, Tx and Paris, TN. Dedicated same year. Same height (!) until Texas added a cowboy hat in 1998 to add some…seems like a quirky documentary!
There's a half scale replica in Las Vegas. But it's pretty easy to tell that replica isn't on the Las Vegas Strip.
There are a number of smaller, less detailed replicas at American amusement parks.
In general, structures more or less inspired by the Eiffel Tower are pretty common around the world. The Eiffel Tower is really popular!
On the other hand, it would be really expensive to replicate and maintain at full scale.
Also, it helps that it's surrounded by Paris. The rebuilding of Paris under Napoleon III is a pretty crazy story.
I took the opposite away from it - a cheap gotcha. How is it a sign of intelligence whether or not you've been to, or intensely studied images of, n+1 Eiffel Towers?
Yeah, in fact, since it's such a cheap gotcha, you'd immediately think "there's no way this is the Eiffel Tower, too silly".
I agree, it is really unimpressive.
If it had been trained on Wikipedia, it should know it:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eiffel_Tower_replicas_and_derivatives
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tianducheng
One hint would have been the size of the tower against the row of houses in the back. The real tower is about 300m I think, so that would make the row of houses 100m high, and probably more as the houses appear to be quite a bit further away than the tower itself, perhaps 150m. A skyscraper-sized city block would at least be unusual, so the conclusion that this is not Paris would be near.
At least this is what I might plausibly have figured out in hindsight if I had bothered to guess. With regard to its real location, I would have had no clue. Of course, if Geoguessers are allowed to use search engines, doing an image search for "Eiffel tower replica" would probably have worked.
Right, the Chinese replica is 108 meters or 354 feet tall.
And, all apartment buildings in the main Haussmannian district of Paris are 6 or 7 stories tall, including the garret where the starving artists live. So, the Eiffel Tower literally towers over Paris.
The general takeaway is that today's LLMs are pretty good at impressing people who are not paying much attention to detail and/or don't know anything about the subject and/or don't double-check the LLM's output. I've seen this in code, art, general knowledge questions, and now GeoGuessr.
If AI really brings about the downfall of humanity, it won't be because we lose John Connor to a time-travelling Terminator, but because we drive off a harbor wall when our GPS nav system tells us to.
I immediately guessed China. It's definitely not France.
I tried doing this with Gemini 2.5 Pro - it suggested Tianducheng for the Eiffel Tower image as well.
Trevor Rainbolt tests, comments on, and competes against o3's geoguessing in this video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=prtWONaO0tE
High chance he'd speak to you if you reached out, very cool and interesting guy.
Seems like the AI struggles with big geographical regions that share the same features.
https://imgur.com/a/6ktg9uv
> “Trevor Rainbolt is as far beyond the rest of us as a helicopter engineer is to a chimp, and if you didn’t predict it was possible for a human to guess the location of a picture of blue sky, then you’re going to be extra-double-surprised by whatever superintelligence can do”.
This is just an unreasonable way to spin it. The average human wouldn’t be able to predict that someone could make a big hunk of metal fly by spinning a few tiny metal blades, and certainly not that you can make atomic bombs, electricity, etc. And yet, this is the kind of uncertainty and unpredictability that we’ve all been living in since the discovery of fire.
Someone getting a feel for how Google Maps pictures of skies in different regions are different from each other isn’t more bewildering to me than electricity or the atomic bomb. It’s very much the same order of magnitude.
And yes, these are all amazing and bewildering things. But they *happen all the time*, and have been happening for a while. I don’t remember anyone freaking out about pro geoguessers in the same way that people are about superintelligence, after all. You’re watering down the claim about superintelligence and a chimp-to-human leap to pretty much just “things will go on as usual”.
Exactly my thoughts. It's impressive, but pretty much all high technology is like that and yet it's so implemented in our daily lives that we don't even care to notice. I'm not too impressed with AI being able to figure out photos of landscapes. That's exactly the kind of thing I would expect it to be good at.
I also would like to see rainbolt guessing 100 straight open sky photos. I'd imagine he only puts the most notable guesses in his videos only. If 100 random people sent him 100 blue sky photos, would he guess many of them?
Hello,
Just adding some thoughts - these capabilities were already available in 4o, and to an extent even GPT-4V.
A team I worked with tested 4o and GPT-4V models on Geoguessr back in 2024. That version of 4o in ChatGPT was capable of everything you described in the post, zero-shot: https://x.com/menhguin/status/1833138220592500767. In fact, we also discovered that its accuracy *improved* when asked not to output CoT.
My hypothesis is that a pre-trained natively multimodal model is inherently capable of such feats zero-shot, and requires no special post-training.
In fact, I took a (extremely downscaled) screenshot of the image you sent, and 4o still got Hangzhou, China! - see below:
----------
This image appears at first glance to be Paris due to the presence of what looks like the Eiffel Tower. However, upon closer inspection, several key clues reveal this is **not** Paris, France:
---
### **Key Clues & Analysis:**
1. **Eiffel Tower Replica**:
* The proportions and surrounding architecture suggest this is not the original Eiffel Tower. It lacks the immediate urban density and layout of central Paris.
* This is a **replica**, not the real tower.
2. **Symmetry and Urban Design**:
* The buildings are styled in Haussmannian Parisian architecture but are **too perfectly mirrored**, more uniform than actual Paris.
* The symmetry is typical of planned developments aiming to mimic European cities.
3. **Commercial Signs**:
* On close zoom, the shops and logos at ground level appear non-French — several signs use Latin-based text typical of faux-European developments, often in China.
4. **Most Likely Match: Tianducheng, China**:
* This is a well-known “fake Paris” development in **Tianducheng**, a real estate project in **Hangzhou, Zhejiang Province, China**.
* It features a 108-meter-tall replica of the Eiffel Tower and Paris-inspired streets and buildings, designed as a luxury development.
---
### **Final Guess**:
```json
{
"lat": 30.2416,
"long": 120.1868,
"city": "Hangzhou",
"country": "China"
}
```
This is the replica Eiffel Tower in **Tianducheng**, a suburb of Hangzhou in eastern China.
Would you like to explore other famous architectural replicas around the world next?
On the other hand 03 really struggled with the Google street view photo just outside my house, the reasoning system getting ever more frantic as it continued to second guess itself. I could see it try and zoom in on house names as well. No luck. Even when I gave some hints and pointed out the camera was facing south (which is something a geo guesser can work out in google street view via the sun position and height) and that there was a visible hill in the distance it really didn’t get much better. In fact it was suggesting places that absolutely wouldn’t have fit those criteria, being too flat or having hills to the east or north of the position, but flatland or sea to the south.
When I have it the county it still got the position in the county wrong. Admittedly the hill is in a different county.
My guess is that it needs the Google street view markers that geo guessers use but, in my case, the system wasn’t very good at other hints.
"Fuji and Everest are both more touristy than Olympus (somehow)"
C'mon, Greek Tourist Bureau, get to work at brainstorming how to promote climbing Mt. Olympus. Run some ideas up the flagpole and see if anybody salutes!
On the other hand, it sounds like AI is only a few years away from overcoming all the problems suggested here.
I can imagine that the National Security Agency has a project to take all photos ever posted online and spit out every photo in which an American asset appears in the same photo as a target: e.g., "You were photographed in 2002 on a tenth grade class trip to the Museum of Science and Industry with the new assistant to the Minister of the Interior in the government of Bolivia. We'd like you to get in touch with your old friend ..."
I wasn't aware that GPT-4o did a good job on Geoguessr! However, if you look at the benchmarks (https://geobench.org/, https://deepguessr.com/), you'll see that open-source models are also on there.
The results are slightly mixed on open vs closed models, but my guess is that models have been trained on Geoguessr-style problems for a while. Llama 3.2 90b Vision is the closest we have to a pre-trained model that's likely not trained on Geoguessr problems and it scores about as well as the average human. Which is pretty impressive to be clear.
How could we test this? I would like to see Molmo (https://allenai.org/blog/molmo) on these benchmarks, since we know the data mix. We can check to see if it has Geoguessr-style problems in its training data and compare its performance to other models.
I would love to see someone who is GPU-rich to run this experiment, happy to discuss exactly what to run :)
Isn't the last one unusually easy? The amount of fake Eiffel towers in the world is surely limited?
I guessed the Fuji Pic correctly, it's the only volcano I've hiked. I think you're slightly below the summit going down on the Yoshida trail.
I imagine if you offered it a different volcano hike in a similar climate it might have guessed Fuji as well
I'm more surprised that it couldn't recognize the photo of Mount Olympus than by anything else here. Granted, I don't think I would have recognized it either, but then I haven't seen every photo of Olympus on the Internet.