ChatGPT Learns to Pinpoint Locations from Photos

Once again, excitement has surged around OpenAI’s new AI models. This time, users are widely determining locations from photographs using ChatGPT.

The geoguessing power of o3 is a really good sample of its agentic abilities. Between its smart guessing and its ability to zoom into images, to do web searches, and read text, the results can be very freaky.

I stripped location info from the photo & prompted “geoguess this” pic.twitter.com/KaQiXHUvYL

— Ethan Mollick (@emollick) April 17, 2025

On April 16, OpenAI released two new neural networks—o3 and o4-mini. Their key feature is “thinking with images” instead of merely analyzing them.

Users have discovered that the models’ ability to analyze images combined with internet searches makes them a powerful tool for determining locations from photos. o3 excels at identifying cities, landmarks, restaurants, and bars from subtle visual clues.

Wow, nailed it and not even a tree in sight. pic.twitter.com/bVcoe1fQ0Z

— swax (@swax) April 17, 2025

On social network X, there are numerous examples of users providing the chatbot with restaurant menus, neighborhood snapshots, building facades, selfies, and asking o3 to pinpoint the location.

The feature also allows users to send the chatbot a photo of any person and discover their geolocation.

this is a fun ChatGPT o3 feature. geoguessr! pic.twitter.com/HrcMIxS8yD

— Jason Barnes (@vyrotek) April 17, 2025

The situation has raised privacy concerns. Nothing prevents a malicious actor from taking a screenshot of an Instagram story and discovering a person’s location.

o3 is insane
I asked a friend of mine to give me a random photo
They gave me a random photo they took in a library
o3 knows it in 20 seconds and it’s right pic.twitter.com/0K8dXiFKOY

— Yumi (@izyuuumi) April 17, 2025

Back in March, the startup added an image generator based on the GPT-4o model to ChatGPT and Sora.

Soon after, the company had to temporarily impose limits on image generation speeds due to the frenzy over mass creation of anime-style images in the Ghibli studio style.