6 ms·
It fails the simple clock test for me which Qwen3.8 27B got (nearly) right. given an image of a clock https://files.catbox.moe/kgwa5e.png https://files.catbox.m
by leumon 26d ago
It fails the simple clock test for me which Qwen3.8 27B got (nearly) right.
given an image of a clock https://files.catbox.moe/kgwa5e.png https://files.catbox.moe/kgwa5e.png
I asked it "what time does the clock show?" (both on reasoning: high)
DS answered: The clock shows *5:10* (and 45 seconds).
Here is the breakdown:
* *Hour hand (red, shortest):* Pointing at the *5*.
* *Minute hand (green, longest):* Pointing at the *2*, which represents 10 minutes.
* *Second hand (blue, medium):* Pointing at the *9*, which represents 45 seconds.
Qwen answered: The clock shows *8:10* (with the red second hand on the 5, i.e. *8:10:25*).
- *Hour hand* (short, blue) → 8
- *Minute hand* (long, green) → 2 (10 minutes)
- *Second hand* (thin, red) → 5 (25 seconds)
Correct answer is 08:09:25.
- ComputerGuru 26d agoGemini 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.
- nubg 26d agowelp, damning indictment. not sure if that means DS is super crap, or qwen is super good
- wolttam 26d agoNeither. Performance of all models is incredibly spikey.
- ttul 26d agoA good share of humanity would have also gotten this question wrong!
- andai 26d agoYeah, 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...)
- mdp2021 26d agoIt's been four years that we are looping those "The professional failed its task!" // "Laymen would have failed it too". Which makes no sense.
- emosenkis 26d agoThis 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?
- leumon 26d agothen 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*."
- dghlsakjg 26d agoQwen still got the wrong answer, though. Are we more forgiving because it’s the same type of mistake a human would make?
- dghlsakjg 26d agoI’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.
- vasco 26d agoIt's still useful to find things it can't do if anything so we can tell when it starts being able to do them.
- CooCooCaCha 26d agoIs being asked to read a clock really a gotcha?
- arjie 26d agoNot 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.
- dghlsakjg 26d agoIf 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.
- CooCooCaCha 26d agoIt would be different if AI was known to be reliable but it isn’t, so this is less of a random failure and more a symptom of jagged intelligence. And with every one of these there’s always an attempt to minimize the problem by saying it’s just one silly failure.
- segmondy 26d agomost 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.
- johnnyApplePRNG 26d agoI 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.
- mkatx 26d agoI 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.
- mschulkind 26d ago[flagged]
- bel8 26d agoWell it succeeded on first try for me: https://i.imgur.com/gljOYr9.png https://i.imgur.com/gljOYr9.png [Image 1] what time does the clock show? + Thought: 368ms The clock shows 8:10. - Blue hour hand: just past 8 - Green minute hand: pointing at 2 (10 minutes) - Red second hand: pointing at 5 (25 seconds) ▣ Plan · DeepSeek V4 Flash Vision Exp · 4.4s edit: I now ran the test 10 times total, fresh session every time, and DS4 got it right 9 out of 10 times. Lesson learned to double check what I read on the internet. I'll leave a copy of the clock image for posterity here in case anyone wants to test it themselves: https://i.imgur.com/BQsfa3R.png https://i.imgur.com/BQsfa3R.png
- deleted 26d ago[deleted]
- leumon 26d agoTry it on openrouter directly if you don't believe me that i got this result. Maybe image inputs behave differently in opencode, or it could even be that this agent harness uses different models for different tasks, not sure. Or maybe the reasoning (high) makes the difference.
- bel8 26d agoI don't doubt you. I just think it's good practice to run more than n=1 before conclusions are made. We're all engineers here.
- efficax 26d agofwiw the clock reads 8:09:25 not 8:10:25 although it would be passable to read it as 8:10 if there were no second hand