I talked to @alex about these and I was incorrect, this is working as designed right now. @graysquirrel’s examples sum it up pretty well.
The actual visual model seems to be working fine, but if you have “Seen nearby only” selected and the top visual match hasn’t been seen nearby, it won’t show that match in “Here are our top suggestions” section. The “We’re pretty sure this is…” section is purely based on visual similarity.
Gunnera tinctoria has been seen nearby spatially, but not temporally (eg in July, August, and September). So sea kale, opium poppy, etc, are the closest visually similar matches that have been seen nearby in both the spatial and temporal sense. More on seen nearby here: https://www.inaturalist.org/pages/help#cv-seen-nearby
When you remove the “Seen nearby only” filter, then the model shows you Gunnera tinctoria as the top visually similar result. This is why we have the “Include suggestions not seen nearby” option, to make up for these kind of holes in the observation data used for seen nearby. As Alex mentioned in his vision model blog post, we’re working on a better way to use geospatial info for suggestions, but this is how it currently works.
When/if @graysquirrel’s observations get to RG and we update the seen nearby data, these observations will fill in some of those temporal gaps.