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The pelican riding a bicycle is excellent. I think it's the best I've seen. https://simonwillison.net/2026/Feb/12/gemini-3-deep-think/ https://simonwillison.ne
by simonw 9mo ago
The pelican riding a bicycle is excellent. I think it's the best I've seen.
https://simonwillison.net/2026/Feb/12/gemini-3-deep-think/ https://simonwillison.net/2026/Feb/12/gemini-3-deep-think/
- deron12 9mo agoIt's worth noting that you mean excellent in terms of prior AI output. I'm pretty sure this wouldn't be considered excellent from a "human made art" perspective. In other words, it's still got a ways to go! Edit: someone needs to explain why this comment is getting downvoted, because I don't understand. Did someone's ego get hurt, or what?
- gs17 9mo agoIt depends, if you meant from a human coding an SVG "manually" the same way, I'd still say this is excellent (minus the reflection issue). If you meant a human using a proper vector editor, then yeah.
- fvdessen 9mo agomaybe you're a pro vector artist but I couldn't create such a cool one myself in illustrator tbh
- dfdsf2 9mo agoIndeed. And when you factor in the amount invested... yeah it looks less impressive. The question is how much more money needs to be invested to get this thing closer to reality? And not just in this instance. But for any instance e.g. a seahorse on a bike.
- Manabu-eo 9mo agoHow likely this problem is already on the training set by now?
- deleted 9mo ago[deleted]
- verdverm 9mo agoI've heard it posited that the reason the frontier companies are frontier is because they have custom data and evals. This is what I would do too
- throwup238 9mo agoFor every combination of animal and vehicle? Very unlikely. The beauty of this benchmark is that it takes all of two seconds to come up with your own unique one. A seahorse on a unicycle. A platypus flying a glider. A man’o’war piloting a Portuguese man of war. Whatever you want.
- recursive 9mo agoNo, not every combination. The question is about the specific combination of a pelican on a bicycle. It might be easy to come up with another test, but we're looking at the results from a particular one here.
- svara 9mo agoMore likely you would just train for emitting svg for some description of a scene and create training data from raster images.
- recursive 9mo agoNone of this works if the testers are collaborating with the trainers. The tests ostensibly need to be arms-length from the training. If the trainers ever start over-fitting to the test, the tester would come up with some new test secretly.
- ebonnafoux 9mo agoYou can easily make a RLAIF loop. - Take a list of n animals * m vehicule - Ask a LLM to generate SVG for this n*m options - Generate png from the svg - Ask a Model with vision to grade the result - Change your weight accordingly No need to human to draw the dataset, no need of human to evaluate.
- throwup238 9mo agoThe reflection of the sun in the water is completely wrong. LLMs are still useless. (/s)
- margalabargala 9mo agoIt's not actually, look up some photos of the sun setting over the ocean. Here's an example: https://stockcake.com/i/sunset-over-ocean_1317824_81961 https://stockcake.com/i/sunset-over-ocean_1317824_81961
- throwup238 9mo agoThat’s only if the sun is above the horizon entirely.
- margalabargala 9mo agoNo, it's not. https://stockcake.com/i/serene-ocean-sunset_1152191_440307 https://stockcake.com/i/serene-ocean-sunset_1152191_440307
- throwup238 9mo agoYes, it is. In that photo the sun is clearly above the horizon, the bottom half is just obscured by clouds.
- saberience 9mo agoDo you have to still keep trying to bang on about this relentlessly? It was sort of humorous for the maybe first 2 iterations, now it's tacky, cheesy, and just relentless self-promotion. Again, like I said before, it's also a terrible benchmark.
- Davidzheng 9mo agoEh, i find it more of a not very informative but lighthearted commentary
- simonw 9mo agoIt being a terrible benchmark is the bit.
- jeanloolz 9mo agoI'll agree to disagree. In any thread about a new model, I personally expect the pelican comment to be out there. It's informative, ritualistic and frankly fun. Your comment however, is a little harsh. Why mad?
- odiroot 9mo agoIt's HN's Carthago delenda est moment.
- dfdsf2 9mo agoHighly disagree. I was expecting something more realistic... the true test of what you are doing is how representative is the thing in relation to the real world. E.g. does the pelican look like a pelican as it exists in reality? This cartoon stuff is cute but doesnt pass muster in my view. If it doesn't relate to the real world, then it most likely will have no real effect on the real economy. Pure and simple.
- peaseagee 9mo agoThe request is for an SVG, generally _not_ the format for photorealistic images. If you want to start your own benchmark, feel free to ask for a photorealistic JPEG or PNG of a pelican riding a bicycle. Could be interesting to compare and contrast, honestly.
- chriswarbo 9mo agoI disagree. The task asks for an SVG; which is a vector format associated with line drawings, clipart and cartoons. I think it's good that models are picking up on that context. In contrast, the only "realistic" SVGs I've seen are created using tools like potrace, and look terrible. I also think the prompt itself, of a pelican on bicycle, is unrealistic and cartoonish; so making a cartoon is a good way to solve the task.
- enraged_camel 9mo agoIs there a list of these for each model, that you've catalogued somewhere?
- simonw 9mo agoAt the moment that's mostly my tag page here but I really need to formalize it: https://simonwillison.net/tags/pelican-riding-a-bicycle/ https://simonwillison.net/tags/pelican-riding-a-bicycle/
- nickthegreek 9mo agoI routinely check out the pelicans you post and I do agree, this is the best yet. It seemed to me that the wings/arms were such a big hangup for these generators.
- tasuki 9mo agoTbh they'd have to be absolutely useless at benchmarkmaxxing if they didn't include your pelican riding a bicycle...
- steve_adams_86 9mo agoWe've reached PGI
- mikestaas 9mo agoWow. I wonder how it would do with pure CSS a la https://diana-adrianne.com/ https://diana-adrianne.com/
- toraway 9mo agoSo, you've said multiple times in the past that you're not concerned about AI labs training for this specific test because if they did, it would be so obviously incongruous that you'd easily spot the manipulation and call them out. Which tbh has never really sat right with me, seemingly placing way too much confidence in your ability to differentiate organic vs. manipulated output in a way I don't think any human could be expected to. To me, this example is an extremely neat and professional SVG and so far ahead it almost seems too good to be true. But like with every previous model, you don't seem to have the slightest amount of skepticism in your review. I don't think I truly believe Google cheated here, but it's so good it does therefore make me question whether there could ever be an example of a pelican SVG in the future that actually could trigger your BS detector? I know you say it's just a fun/dumb benchmark that's not super important, but you're easily in the top 3 most well known AI "influencers" whose opinion/reviews about model releases carry a lot of weight, providing a lot of incentive with trillions of dollars flying around. Are you still not at all concerned by the amount of attention this benchmark receives now/your risk of unwittingly being manipulated?
- simonw 9mo agoThe other SVGs I tried from my private collection of prompts were all similarly impressive.
- buttered_toast 9mo agoIs there a way you can showcase a few of these?
- simonw 9mo agoNot without people later saying "you shared that on Hacker News last year clearly the AI labs are training for it now!"
- buttered_toast 9mo agoCouldn't you just make up new combinations, or new caveats indefinitely to mitigate that? It would be nice to see maybe 3-4 good examples for validation. I'd do it myself, but I don't have $200 to play around with this model.
- zozbot234 9mo agoThis benchmark outcome is actually really impressive given the difficulty of this task. It shows that this particular model manages to "think" coherently and maintain useful information in its context for what has to be an insane overall amount of tokens, likely across parallel "thinking" chains. Likely also has access to SVG-rendering tools and can "see" and iterate on the result via multimodal input.
- ramesh31 9mo ago>"The pelican riding a bicycle is excellent. I think it's the best I've seen. https://simonwillison.net/2026/Feb/12/gemini-3-deep-think/ https://simonwillison.net/2026/Feb/12/gemini-3-deep-think/" Yeah this is nuts. First real step-change we've seen since Claude 3.5 in '24.