Comment by bogtog

I can't speak to whether it is a parlor trick, but my gut is that processing a 30x30 grid isn't really representative of o3's image processing. This tiny grid isn't like any image it would encounter normally and is so short that the benefits of language processing outweight the downsides.

I expect that for a much larger images (e.g., 300x300 grids) and for problems simpler than ARC, that o3's image processing would give it a lead over o3 processing a very long character stream.