That's impressive. I'm also a bit surprised - I wouldn't have expected it to be trained much at all on that sort of visual input task. I think I'd be similarly surprised to learn that a frontier model was particularly good at playing retro videogames or actuating a robot for example.

However, if it can't figure out to render the json to a visual on its own does it really qualify as AGI? I'd still say the benchmark is doing its job here. Granted it's not a perfectly even playing field in that case but I think the goal is to test for progress towards AGI as opposed to hosting a fair tournament.

Source? I haven't seen anything like that for ARC-AGI performance.

Also, if it makes that big of a difference, then make a renderer for your agent that looks like the web page and have it solve them in the graphical interface and funnel the results to the API. I guarantee you won't get better performance, because the AGI is going to have to "understand" the raw data can be represented as a 2D matrix regardless of whether it gets a 2D matrix of pixels or a 2D matrix of enumeration in JSON. If anything, that makes it a more difficult problem for a AI system that "speaks" in tokens.