Alpine Ibex Vision Test

Here’s an image of a herd of ibex I took in August 2024 in the Vercors mountain range in France. There are over 20 of them, but yes, they’re really hard to see. I even had a hard time spotting them just a few hours after I saw them, so I was curious whether AI could do it. I asked some models whether they could spot any animals in the photo

Back then, nearly all state-of-the-art models failed miserably, typically detecting only a single ibex, but I did get some funny responses.

In April 2026, I tried it again, and this time I got some much better results, with Gemini 3.1 Pro detecting up to 10 ibex.

Possibly the most interesting result came when I asked Gemini to annotate them. It said it couldn’t. But when I instead asked it to regenerate the image with the animals painted in blue, it produced the image below. The capability was there all along. It was just a matter of framing the task differently to trigger it.