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I’ll keep that in mind next time I need to tell what time it is by asking an llm to read an analog clock.

Snark aside, I’m not sure that these gotcha tests are any more useful than asking politicians gotcha questions. Sure, the model can’t tell me what time it is, but it can code the Wang algorithm for noisy audio matching in one shot. Maybe this is just me being an optimist, but this is my hiring philosophy and I guess maybe now my llm philosophy: I’m not interested in seeing how dumb I can make you look, I’m more interested in how smart you can be.

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Reading any analog clock at any time level (edit: and a non-noisy vector rendered image at that) is absolutely table stakes for an allegedly frontier flagship vision model. As much as 1:1 OCR. If the model can't do that, there's something wrong. Doesn't matter if it's memorized some random thing you think is esoteric but is in all the training data and benchmarks.

The whole point of LLM/FMs vs good old fashioned ML is generalization to unknown domains, not just unknown tasks. The hunt for "gotchas" is the hunt for "not in your training data".

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It's because the messaging for what the point of these things is supposed to be is all over the place. Ask 10 different people and you'll get 10 different answers:

- A superintelligence that will usher in an age of human enlightenment

- A superintelligence that will usher in an age of human enslavement

- A really cool way to rake in trillion of rich VC/investor money by promising you're building a superintelligence that will usher in an age of human en[slave/lighten]ment

- A transformer model for predicting output tokens given a series of input tokens, informed primarily by reddit, stack overflow, and 6000 years of classical literature.

- A replacement for white collar labor. Start now or join the permanent underclass.

- A convenient fuzzy-find tool also capable of some probably-correct code generation.

- The ultimate customizable text RPG experience (you can pick if G stand for game or...)

And so on.

So, some people see a new model and check for how close humanity is to enslavement. Some people check to see if it got better at fixing broken unit tests.

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What's amazing is that all of these are true at once. If you allow for some significant slack in what "superintelligence" means.
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Knowing where it fails is just as important as knowing where is excels.
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It is like asking a politician how much a coffee costs, to show how disconnected they are from common people. Super intelligence not being able to read a simple analog clock does the same.

> Sure, the model can’t tell me what time it is, but it can code the Wang algorithm for noisy audio matching in one shot

This is about a _vision_ model.

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It's still useful to find things it can't do if anything so we can tell when it starts being able to do them.
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Is being asked to read a clock really a gotcha?
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If I had to hire an engineer and there was one that could one shot the wang algorithm, but couldn’t read an analog clock, I would have no problem hiring them.

Also worth noting that both models got it wrong. Qwen made a mistake that humans very good at reading clocks would make. Deepseek made a mistake that a human who had just learned to read clocks would make.

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Not if you are aiming at a general intelligence but it’s worth considering that this is a tool that may not be able to count the number of strawberries in the letter R but can still center a div.
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I would say, try without thinking on. I find reasoning on any rag type request seems to increase hallucinations, probably due to the thinking tokens taking attention away from the, in this case, vision tokens.

I'd recommend non-thinking for any non-prompt input, and leave the thinking where it has to actually reason.

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This is not a normal looking clock - most clocks have either one color for all hands (second hand is thinnest and maybe also longest) or one color for hour/minute and one for second. I know that the hand lengths and thicknesses on this image are correct but for some reason I, a totally human person who grew up when analog clocks were still common, see this and think the hand on the 5 is the minute hand. How does the AI do if you just make all the hands black?
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then deepseek answers: "The clock shows 8:25. The short hour hand is pointing to the 8, and the long minute hand is pointing to the 5, which represents 25 minutes."

and qwen still answers: "The clock shows *8:10* (with the second hand on the 5, i.e., 25 seconds). - *Hour hand* points to the 8 - *Minute hand* points to the 2 (= 10 minutes) - *Second hand* points to the 5 (= 25 seconds) So the time is *8:10:25*, or simply *8:10*."

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Qwen still got the wrong answer, though.

Are we more forgiving because it’s the same type of mistake a human would make?

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A good share of humanity would have also gotten this question wrong!
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It's been four years that we are looping those

"The professional failed its task!" // "Laymen would have failed it too".

Which makes no sense.

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Yeah, I heard most kids these days can't read analog clocks either.

I can't actually remember where I learned to read a clock, it might have actually been in school. I guess that means they don't teach it anymore. (Everyone's phone shows the time anyway...)

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I was wasting hours yesterday trying to get DeepSeek V4 Flash (with Qwen 3.8 27b as the vision agent, actually) to read sheet music to pass a Terminal Bench 3 benchmark and none of it was working... nothing... I changed models to gemma 31b, I tried OCR models... nothing could get it...

And then I realized, wait a second... you're testing the harness not only against a difficult benchmarking problem, but it's one you're literally never going to use the coding harness for either, lol. I don't write programs that read or interact with sheet music and I never will.

tl;dr Being frustrated that a "state of the art" vision model doesn't have perfect vision is a fools errand.

It can read and extract information from screenshots and PDFs just fine (my setup). No need to worry about edge cases.

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Gemini 3.7 Flash and 5.6-Sol (on all reasoning levels) also answer 8:10:25. The new "stealth" Ox Alpha also replies with the same. Opus 5 replies with 8:10 (no seconds). Not sure why this is so hard for them; Gemini is especially good at vision and I would have expected better from it.
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most likely a preview. they often release the preview via API, get more training data, post train some more then release the weight. i would expect to see it perform better in a few weeks or a month.
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welp, damning indictment. not sure if that means DS is super crap, or qwen is super good
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Neither. Performance of all models is incredibly spikey.
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