I asked the just-released ChatGPT o4-mini-high to locate four photographs of varying difficulty. It didn’t get any of them right, though the guesses weren’t bad. The reasoning was also interesting to watch, as it cropped sections of the photos to examine them more closely. I put the photos, response, and reasoning trace here:

https://www.gally.net/temp/20250418chatgptgeoguesser/index.h...

Later: I tried the same prompt and photos with Gemini 2.5 Pro. It also got them all wrong, though with a similar degree of reasonableness to its guesses. I had thought that Google’s map and street-view data might lead to better results, but not this time.

Still later: I later read that o3 is supposedly particularly good with this geoguessing, so I tried the same prompt and photos with o3. This time it got one out of four correct: “The view of the canal with cherry blossoms and the green railway viaduct is the Ōoka River in Yokohama, looking north from the little road bridge between Hinodechō and Koganechō stations. The tracks on the left belong to the Keikyū Main Line, and the high‑rises in the distance are the Minato‑Mirai and Kita‑Naka district towers.” Its other three answers were still wrong.