Vision AI in 2025 — Peter Robicheaux, Roboflow
Aug 3, 2025 · 17:24
Peter Robicheaux, ML lead at Roboflow, argues vision models are not smart because they fail at basic visual tasks like telling time on a watch or identifying a school bus direction. He attributes this to saturated evals like ImageNet and COCO, and to vision models not leveraging large pre-training like language models. Roboflow introduces RFDetter, a real-time detector using a Dynav2 backbone, achieving second SOTA on COCO and large gains on their new RF100VL dataset of 100 diverse domains. The benchmark shows specialist models fine-tuned on 10-shot examples outperform large VLMs like Qwen2.5 VL 72B, indicating VLMs are strong linguistically but weak visually. Roboflow's platform is free for researchers contributing data back; dataset at rf100vl.org.
