Have Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) Really Learned to Tell the Time on Analog Clocks?

Multimodal Large Language Models which can answer complex questions on an image struggle to tell the time on analog clocks. This is probably due to the lack of images with clocks at different times in their training set. In this work we explore this issue with one of the latest MLLMs: GPT-4.1 to understand why MLLMs fail to tell the time and whether fine-tuning can solve the problem. The results show how models are making progress in reading the time on analog clocks. But have they really learned to do it, or have they only learned patterns in their training datasets? In this work we put the models to the test with different clocks to illustrate the limitations of MLLMs to abstract and generalize.

Speed and Conversational Large Language Models: Not All Is About Tokens per Second

The speed of open-weights large language models (LLMs) and its dependency on the task at hand, when run on GPUs, is studied to present a comparative analysis of the speed of the most popular open LLMs.

Open Source Conversational LLMs do not know most Spanish words

The growing interest in Large Language Models (LLMs) and in particular in conversational models with which users can interact has led to the development of a large number of open-source chat LLMs. These models are evaluated on a wide range of benchmarks to assess their capabilities in answering questions or solving problems on almost any possible topic or to test their ability to reason or interpret texts. Instead, the evaluation of the knowledge that these models have of the languages has received much less attention. For example, the words that they can recognize and use in different languages. In this paper, we evaluate the knowledge that open-source chat LLMs have of Spanish words by testing a sample of words in a reference dictionary. The results show that open-source chat LLMs produce incorrect meanings for an important fraction of the words and are not able to use most of the words correctly to write sentences with context. These results show how Spanish is left behind in the open-source LLM race and highlight the need to push for linguistic fairness in conversational LLMs ensuring that they provide similar performance across languages.