It is the first model to get partial-credit on an LLM image test I have. Which is counting the legs of a dog. Specifically, a dog with 5 legs. This is a wild test, because LLMs get really pushy and insistent that the dog only has 4 legs.
In fact GPT5 wrote an edge detection script to see where "golden dog feet" met "bright green grass" to prove to me that there were only 4 legs. The script found 5, and GPT-5 then said it was a bug, and adjusted the script sensitivity so it only located 4, lol.
Anyway, Gemini 3, while still being unable to count the legs first try, did identify "male anatomy" (it's own words) also visible in the picture. The 5th leg was approximately where you could expect a well endowed dog to have a "5th leg".
That aside though, I still wouldn't call it particularly impressive.
As a note, Meta's image slicer correctly highlighted all 5 legs without a hitch. Maybe not quite a transformer, but interesting that it could properly interpret "dog leg" and ID them. Also the dog with many legs (I have a few of them) all had there extra legs added by nano-banana.
Then I asked both Gemini and Grok to count the legs, both kept saying 4.
Gemini just refused to consider it was actually wrong.
Grok seemed to have an existential crisis when I told it it was wrong, becoming convinced that I had given it an elaborate riddle. After thinking for an additional 2.5 minutes, it concluded: "Oh, I see now—upon closer inspection, this is that famous optical illusion photo of a "headless" dog. It's actually a three-legged dog (due to an amputation), with its head turned all the way back to lick its side, which creates the bizarre perspective making it look decapitated at first glance. So, you're right; the dog has 3 legs."
You're right, this is a good test. Right when I'm starting to feel LLMs are intelligent.
Its rather like as humans we are RL’d like crazy to be grossed out if we view a picture of a handsome man and beautiful woman kissing (after we are told they are brother and sister) -
Ie we all have trained biases - that we are told to follow and trained on - human art is about subverting those expectations
RL has been used extensively in other areas - such as coding - to improve model behavior on out-of-distribution stuff, so I'm somewhat skeptical of handwaving away a critique of a model's sophistication by saying here it's RL's fault that it isn't doing well out-of-distribution.
If we don't start from a position of anthropomorphizing the model into a "reasoning" entity (and instead have our prior be "it is a black box that has been extensively trained to try to mimic logical reasoning") then the result seems to be "here is a case where it can't mimic reasoning well", which seems like a very realistic conclusion.