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Comment by djoldman | Hacker News Reader

Interesting "ScreenSpot Pro" results:

    72.7% Gemini 3 Pro
    11.4% Gemini 2.5 Pro
    49.9% Claude Opus 4.5
    3.50% GPT-5.1

ScreenSpot-Pro: GUI Grounding for Professional High-Resolution Computer Use

https://arxiv.org/abs/2504.07981

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I was surprised at how poorly GPT-5 did in comparison to Opus 4.1 and Gemini 2.5 on a pretty simple OCR task a few months ago - I should run that again against the latest models and see how they do. https://simonwillison.net/2025/Aug/29/the-perils-of-vibe-cod...

Agreed, GPT-5 and even 5.1 is noticeably bad at OCR. OCRArena backs this up: https://www.ocrarena.ai/leaderboard (I personally would rank 5.1 as even worse than it is there).

According to the calculator on the pricing page (it's inside a toggle at the bottom of the FAQs), GPT-5 is resizing images to have a minor dimension of at most 768: https://openai.com/api/pricing/ That's ~half the resolution I would normally use for OCR, so if that's happening even via the API then I guess it makes sense it performs so poorly.

and GPT4 was pretty decent at OCR, so that's weird?

That is... astronomically different. Is GPT-5.1 downscaling and losing critical information or something? How could it be so different?

I found much better results with smallish UI elements in large screenshots on GPT by slicing it up manually and feeding them one at a time. I think it does severely lossy downscaling.

It has a rather poor max resolution. Higher resolution images get tiled up to a point. 512 x 512, I think is the max tile size, 2048 x 2048 the max canvas.

This is my default explanation for visual impairments in LLMs, they're trying to compress the image into about 3000 tokens, you're going to lose a lot in the name of efficiency.

impressive.....most impressive

its going to reach low 90s very soon if trends continue

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