They aren't fake. I'm a Master I level Geoguessr (the penultimate competitive ranking) and what the pros can do is very real.
I looked at the image in the post before seeing the answer and would have guessed near San Francisco.
It seems impressive to someone if you haven't played Geoguessr a lot, but you'd be surprised at how much information there is about location from an image. The LLMs are just verbalizing what is happening in a few seconds in good player's mind.
I couldn't agree more. It's very impressive. I'm just countering the claim that it might be cheating. Of course, sometimes it might be, but knowing what I know now, it's completely possible.
One forward pass is probably faster than 0.1 second. You can see its performance here: https://youtube.com/watch?v=ts5lPDV--cU (rainbolt is a really strong player)
Not just cheating, but just lots of meta, from the blurred number plates color/format, to the stitching of the image at the bottom, mounting location of the camera on the google car. There are list which variant of car was used in which countries and so on. Which is still impressive but not quite the same as just guessing from the image
Every attribute is of importance. A PhD put you in a 1-3% pool. What data do you have, what is needed to hit a certain goal. Data Science can be considered wizardry when exercised on seemingly innocent and mundane things like a photo.
Geoguessr is different as you can rely on implementation details, such as the camera generation, car, processing, and stuff like a large part of some countries being covered with a dirty spot somewhere in the FOV.
