Watching o3 guess a photo’s location is surreal, dystopian and wildly entertaining

Put together, that points to one of the small Highway 1 villages. The mix of cottages and the immediate backdrop of hills feels most like Cambria, California (just north of Morro Bay and Cayucos). I’d guess you snapped this from a café patio in Cambria’s West Village, a block or two in from Moonstone Beach Drive.

(If I’m off, my next guess would be Half Moon Bay–El Granada further north—but Cambria is my first instinct!)

I’m embarrassed that I didn’t think to check this, but it turns out o3 does have a loose model of your location made available to it now—presumably as part of its improved search feature. It knows I’m in Half Moon Bay.

I'm going to leave this here. TL;DR modern AI chatbots have learned the same cold reading techniques as fake psychics. This is almost textbook: A generic guess followed by some more specific guesses, framed up in a way that the person will automatically glom onto the most accurate of the three and conclude that the thing is a genius whichever one is correct, and happily subconsciously add things like "200 miles is not a big deal" to the model when it needs the help, and not regard it as all that big a deal if the thing is just 1,000% wrong some of the time. And also, it will not mention when it is digging through EXIF tags or its prompted location data. Of course. It's not trained for honesty, it's specifically trained to generate pleasingly misleading answers.

For all I know, the "chain of thought" stuff is going to evolve into AGI and this location identification is working gangbusters. I have no idea, I haven't tried. But be careful with assigning success to this stuff.