This August 2025 academic paper, titled "Has GPT-5 Achieved Spatial Intelligence? An Empirical Study," examines the spatial understanding and reasoning capabilities of advanced multi-modal AI models, including the recently released GPT-5. The authors propose a new taxonomy for spatial tasks and evaluate both proprietary and open-source models against eight key benchmarks, utilizing over a billion tokens for their study. Their findings indicate that while GPT-5 shows unprecedented strength in spatial intelligence, it still falls short of human performance across a broad range of tasks. The research also identifies specific challenging problems for multi-modal models and notes that proprietary models don't consistently outperform open-source options on the most difficult problems. The study further includes a qualitative evaluation of scenarios that are intuitive for humans but prove difficult for even the most advanced AI models.
Source:
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.13142
