Comment by HarHarVeryFunny

2 days ago

I don't see how this is mind blowing, or even mildly surprising! It's essentially going to use the set of features detected in the photo as a filter to find matching photos in the training set, and report the most frequent matches. Sometimes it'll get it right, sometimes not.

It'd be interesting to see the photo in the linked story at same resolution as provided to o3, since the licence plate in the photo in the story is at way lower resolution than the zoomed in version shown that o3 had access to. It's not a great piece of primary evidence to focus on though since a CA plate doesn't have to mean the car is in CA.

The clues that o3 doesn't seem to be paying attention to seems just as notable as the ones it does. Why is it not talking about car models, felt roof tiles, sash windows, mini blinds, fire pit (with warning on glass, in english), etc?

Being location-doxxed by a computer trained on a massive set of photos is unsurprising, but the example given doesn't seem a great example of why this could/will be a game changer in terms of privacy. There's not much detective work going on here - just narrowing the possibilities based on some of the available information, and happening to get it right in this case.

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HarHarVeryFunny

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simonw  2 days ago

If you want to be impressed I suggest trying this yourself on your own photos.

I don't consider it my job to impress or mind-blow people: I try to present as realistic as possible a representation of what this stuff can do.

That's why I picked an example where its first guess was 200 miles off!

  • cyral  2 days ago

    Reading the replies to this is funny. It's like the classic dropbox thread. "But this could be done with a nearest neighbor search and feature detection!" If this isn't mind blowing to someone I don't know if any amount of explaining will help them get it.

    • casey2  1 day ago

      It's not mindblowing because there were public systems doing performing much better years earlier. Using the exact same tech. This is less like rsync vs drop box and more like you are freaking out over Origin or Uplay when Steam has been around for years.

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