Comment by SamPatt

No, I took screenshots to ensure it.

Your skepticism is warranted though - I was a part of an AI safety fellowship last year and our project was creating a benchmark for how good AI models are at geolocation from images. [This is where my Geoguessr obsession started!]

Our first run showed results that seemed way too good; even the bad open source models were nailing some difficult locations, and at small resolutions too.

It turned out that the pipeline we were using to get images was including location data in the filename, and the models were using that information. Oops.

The models have improved very quickly since then. I assume the added reasoning is a major factor.