Bluesky Thread

Gemini 3 on par with experts

November 13, 2025 View original thread

Gemini 3 on par with experts

this riveting (surprise!) tale from a determined 18th-19th century historian explains

1. OCR can be difficult, excruciatingly difficult

2. Gemini 3 seems to do true reasoning to decipher old hand written ledgers, beyond GPT-5-Pro

open.substack.com/pub/generati...

If this behaviour proves reliable and replicable, it points to something profound that the labs are also starting to admit: that true reasoning may not require explicit rules or symbolic scaffolding to arise, but can instead emerge from scale, multimodality, and exposure to enough structured complexity. In that case, the sugar-loaf entry is more than a remarkable transcription, it is a small but clear (and I think unambiguous) sign that the line between pattern recognition and genuine understanding is beginning to blur.

40 5

The handwriting wasn’t simply hard to read, it was sometimes wrong (in that the author took a shortcut)

in order to correct these shortcuts, Gemini needed to understand arcane numbering systems, recognize exceptions, add and check consistency

the post is worthwhile, even for nothing other than learning how hard OCR can be, how much reasoning and domain knowledge goes into it

and then beyond that, Gemini 3 seems to be a significant step up

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