OpenStreetMap has an amazingly powerful query language, "Overpass". Sadly it was designed by a madman and is hard to learn. Luckily GPT-4 knows it well: "Give me an overpass query that finds all buildings that straddle the boundary between Glendale and Burbank in California."

Last night there was a loud explosion in LA. I figured it was a transformer explosion. A friend had video showing a 9 second delay between flash and boom so I used GPT-4 to write an Overpass query to find all electrical substations about the right distance to cause that delay.

(If you are the mad person who designed Overpass, I thank you and it's incredible—best super power ever. I just can't learn it.)

should say that if you want to try Overpass, whether you wrote it or had GPT write it (and GPT-4 is significantly better at it than GPT-3.5-turbo), you can run queries at https://overpass-turbo.eu. And there's actually a very nice tutorial at https://overpass-turbo.eu

Using the real coordinates of my friend w/ video of the flash and boom, and GPT-4's Overpass query for OSM, I found 3 electrical substations at about the right distance. #1 is the LADWP Valley Generating Station, and is also in the observed direction of the flash. Case closed!

(Case closed, but @jbum actually solved it first, without AI. I just had to confirm I could get the same result with GPT-4 and Overpass :) )