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...
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
@timkellogg.me it is definitely a good dive in handwriting recognition (which is a niche use case by volume). I don't think the model had to make a calculation in that case though, it would only have needed enough knowledge about the context (how much sugar is typically bought, what units are used...).
Gemini 3 may still be better than others at synthesizing context and its learned knowledge, but that seems more of an incremental improvement than the post makes it out to be.
