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Comment by thomasfromcdnjs | Hacker News Reader

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thomasfromcdnjs

I uploaded this image that I screenshotted off Google street view (no metadata) and it got with 200m.

https://chatgpt.com/share/6801bbf7-fd40-8008-985d-75c8813f55...

There is the chat.

Weirdly it said, "I’ve seen that exact house before on Google Street View when exploring Cairns neighborhoods."

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> Weirdly it said, "I’ve seen that exact house before on Google Street View when exploring Cairns neighborhoods."

That's slightly creepy!

The anthropomorphisation certainly is weird. But the technical aspect seems even weirder. Did OpenAI really build dedicated tools to have their models train on Google Street View? Or do they have generic technology for browsing complex sites like Street view?

It’s just a hallucination, same idea as o3 claiming that it uses its laptop to mine Bitcoin:

https://transluce.org/investigating-o3-truthfulness

I doubt the model was trained on Street View, but even if it was, LLMs don’t retain any “memory” of how/when they were trained, so any element of truthfulness would be coincidental.

If it's trained on street view data it's not unlikely that the model can associate a particular piece of context to street view. For example, a picture can have telltale signs that street view content has, such as blurred faces and street signs, watermarks, etc.

Even if it's not directly trained on street view data it has probably encountered street view content in it's training dataset.

I think the test which the OP performed (to pick a random street view and let it pinpoint it) would indicate that it has ingested some kind of information in this regard in a structured manner.

The training process doesn't preserve information needed for the LLM to infer that. It cannot be anything other than nonsense that sounds plausible, which is what they do best.

They should definitely add that feature.

Tell it your name and then it just looks you up and street views your house, and puts that all into memory.

It might train off of street view

This was the image: https://imgur.com/a/cCUvgDG

This is the most impressive ChatGPT chat I’ve seen yet. While I theoretically can accept how large-scale probabilistic text generation can lead to this chain of “reasoning”, it really feels like actual intelligence.

It's been intelligence for a long time; the goalposts just shift, and people can't abstract the idea to an LLM. But language processing and large data processing itself IS a form of intelligence.

Maybe you're right, but I think it's more likely that it had been trained on street view photos and then invented a plausible justification for the guess afterwards (which is something I often see ChatGPT do, when it easily arrives at the correct answer, but gives bullshit explanations for it).

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