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Gemini 3 Deep Think drew me a good SVG of a pelican riding a bicycle
- rustyhancock 8mo agoThe intensity of competition between models is so intense right now they are definitely benchmaxxing pelican on bike SVGs and Will Smith spaghetti dinner videos.
- bayindirh 8mo agoSo, again, when the indicator becomes a target, it stops being a good indicator.
- rcbdev 8mo agoGoodhart's law in action.
- kakugawa 8mo agoThat's how you know you've made it: when your pet benchmark becomes a target.
- JumpCrisscross 8mo ago> when the indicator becomes a target, it stops being a good indicator But it's still a fair target. Unless it's hard coded into Gemini 3 DT, for which we have no evidence and decent evidence against, I'd say it's still informative.
- yieldcrv 8mo agonote that this benchmark aside, they've gotten really good at SVGs, I used to rely on the nounproject for icons, and sometimes various libraries, but now coding agents just synthesize an SVG tag in the code and draw all icons.
- stared 8mo agoThere was Lenna for digital image compression (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lenna https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lenna). A pelican on a bike is SFW, inclusive, yet cool. It is not a full benchmark - rather a litmus test.
- oplav 8mo agoI never realized Lenna was a Playboy centerfold until years after I first encountered it, which was part of an MP in the data structures class all CS undergrads take at UIUC. There’s also the foreman for video: https://youtube.com/watch?v=0cdM-7_xUXM https://youtube.com/watch?v=0cdM-7_xUXM
- thatguysaguy 8mo agoYou can just try other svgs, I got some pretty good ones. (*Disclaimer: I work for Google, but also I have zero idea about what they trained deepthink on)
- bonesss 8mo agoParallel hypothesis: the intensity of competition between models is so intense that any high-engagement high-relevance web discussion about any LLM/AI generation is gonna hit the self-guided self-reinforced model training and result in de facto benchmaxxing. Which is only to say: if we HN-front-page it, they will come (generate).
- deleted 8mo ago[deleted]
- throwaway333444 8mo agoSince it’s a* FAQ… Also that pelican is pretty fly
- bstsb 8mo agoread it aloud. “since it’s an FAQ”, where FAQ is pronounced “eff-ay-queue”
- rcarmo 8mo agoI don't think this is a good "benchmark" anymore. It's probably on everyone's training set by now.
- staticassertion 8mo agoI think it could still be an interesting benchmark. Like, assuming AI companies are genuinely trying to solve this pelican problem, how well do they solve it? That seems valid, and the assumption here is that the approach they take could generalize, which seems plausible.
- HDThoreaun 8mo agoThe point of this benchmark is that making decent SVG art is actually useful. Simon has private image prompts he uses, since he didnt say gemini failed at those it is reasonable to assume those were also successful.
- bulletsvshumans 8mo agoThey rigged it.
- ranger_danger 8mo agoSource:
- aidos 8mo agoThe bicycles are getting pretty cyclable now. I’m enjoying this pelican that’s already sliced and ready to bbq.
- vessenes 8mo agoSimon notes this benchmark is win-win, since he loves pictures of pelicans riding bicycles — if they spend time benchmaxxing it’s like free pelicans for him. He originally promised to generate a bunch more animals when we got a “good” pelican. This is not a good pelican. This is an OUTSTANDING pelican, a great bicycle, and it even has a little sun ray over the ocean marked out. I’d like to see more animals please Simon!
- alterom 8mo ago> a great bicycle It's not. Sorry. Go look at some real bicycles for reference.
- losthubble 8mo agoWhat part is missing? It appears to have all the core parts of a bicycle to me?
- alterom 8mo ago> What part is missing? It appears to have all the core parts of a bicycle to me? * I am not an expert in pelican anatomy, but it appears that the bicycle's saddle, if present, would be very deeply inside this pelican (try drawing it onto the frame, and see what you get). Let's be kind, and assume that the seat is simply missing. * The crown on the fork[1] is missing. The fork is not separate from the frame; so you can't turn the front wheel. * Neither of pelican's feet are on the pedals (the left foot appears to be missing altogether) * The wheels are way too small for that frame. Note: Brakes and gears are nowhere to be seen, but OK, let's just assume it's a fixie (or a single-speed with a coaster brake). Let's also assume the red thing on the basket is there for decoration. Also, the spokes on a typical bicycle wheel follow a cross-lacing pattern [2], at an angle to the radial direction, and you can see them crossing each other. But OK, let's let that slide. My point is: sure, this thing at least passes as a bicycle. But it's not a good bicycle drawing. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bicycle_fork https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bicycle_fork [2] https://spokecalc.io/how-to-lace-a-wheel.php https://spokecalc.io/how-to-lace-a-wheel.php
- manojlds 8mo agoIt's funny how I can know where the post is from just by looking at the title (and it's not just about pelicans)
- kittbuilds 8mo agoSVG generation is a surprisingly good benchmark for spatial reasoning because it forces the model to work in a coordinate system with no visual feedback loop. You have to hold a mental model of what the output looks like while emitting raw path data and transforms. It's closer to how a blind sculptor works than how an image diffusion model works. What I find interesting is that Deep Think's chain-of-thought approach helps here — you can actually watch it reason about where the pedals should be relative to the wheels, which is something that trips up models that try to emit the SVG in one shot. The deliberative process maps well to compositional visual tasks.
- actsasbuffoon 8mo agoYeah, spatial reasoning has been a weak spot for LLMs. I’m actually building a new code exercise for my company right now where the candidate is allowed to use any AI they want, but it involves spatial reasoning. I ran Opus 4.6 and Codex 5.3 (xhigh) on it and both came back with passable answers, but I was able to double the score doing it by hand. It’ll be interesting to see what happens if a candidate ever shows up and wants to use Deep Think. Might blow right through my exercise.
- segmondy 8mo agoFor those claiming they rigged it. Do you have any concrete evidence? What if the models have just gotten really good? I just asked Gemini pro to generate an SVG of an octopus dunking a basketball and it did a great job. Not even Deep Think model. Then I did "generate an svg of raccoon at a beach drinking a beer" you can go try this out yourself. Ask it to generate anything you want in SVG. use your imagination. Rant: This is why AI is going to take over, folks are not even trying the least.
- JumpCrisscross 8mo ago> What if the models have just gotten really good? Kagi Assistant remains my main way of interacting with AI. One of its benefits is you're encouraged to try different models. The heterogeneity in competence, particular per unit in time, is growing rapidly. If I'm extrapolating image-creation capabilities from Claude, I'm going to underestimate what Gemini can do without fuckery. Likewise, if I'm using Grok all day, Gemini and Claude will seem unbelievably competent when it comes to deep research.
- colecut 8mo agoand it will be folks using AI taking over for at least a while... Some people try, most people don't. AI makes doing almost anything easier for the people that do.. Despite the prophesied near-term obliteration of white collar work, I've never felt luckier to work in software.
- WarmWash 8mo agoSimon has a private set of SVG tests he uses as well. He said that the private ones were just as impressive.
- raincole 8mo agoEvery bit of improvement on AI ability will have the corresponding denial phrase. Some people still think AI can't generate the correct number of fingers today.
- halJordan 8mo ago
- bfung 8mo agoIn the spirit of Winter Olympics, I vote “Lion on a bobsled” next bench . :)
- stephc_int13 8mo agoMany tests are asymmetrical. They can reliably show an issue/abnormality but they are a lot less reliable on the other side of the curve.
- Springtime 8mo agoI have wondered if with these tests it'll reach a point where online models cheat by generating a line art raster reference then behind the scenes deciding how to vectorize it in the most minimalist way (eg: using strokes and shape elements, etc, rather than naively using path outlines for all forms).
- taberiand 8mo agoIs that cheating, or is that just working smarter not harder?
- Springtime 8mo agoThe interesting aspect of the ongoing tests I feel is seeing how models can plan out an image directly using SVG primatives solely through reasoning (code-to-code). If they have a reference then it's a different type of challenge (optimizing for a trace).
- simonw 8mo agoThis Deep Think one was so good that I did get suspicious that maybe it was at least rendering the SVG to an image and then "looking" at the image and tweaking it over a few iterations. But the reasoning trace doesn't hint at that and looks legit to me: https://gist.github.com/simonw/7e317ebb5cf8e75b2fcec4d0694a8199#thinking-trace https://gist.github.com/simonw/7e317ebb5cf8e75b2fcec4d0694a8... I also asked Deep Think what tools it has access to and it has Python and Bash but no internet access, and as far as I can tell that environment doesn't have any libraries or tools installed that can render an SVG to an image format that it could view.
- tylervigen 8mo agoThat’s among the most artistic SVGs I’ve ever seen, period.
- alestainer 8mo agoInteresting thing: I've got my internal request that is similar to this pelican. And there was 0 progress on it in the past ~2 years. Which might have at least a couple of explanations. 1. Spillage into the pre-training: some real artist had drawn a pelican riding a bicycle. 2. Seeing it as an important discourse for model intelligence in the training data might affect allocation of compute into solving this problem, either thru engineers or the model itself finding the texts about this challenge.
- WarmWash 8mo agoAre AI labs training on the bike Pelican? From the blog: >The strongest argument is that they would get caught. If a model finally comes out that produces an excellent SVG of a pelican riding a bicycle you can bet I’m going to test it on all manner of creatures riding all sorts of transportation devices. If those are notably worse it’s going to be pretty obvious what happened. He mentioned in the Deep Think thread the other day that his secret test set also was impressive.
- pcmaffey 8mo agoNow animate it with SMIL
- fulafel 8mo agoHas anyone benchmarked humans on this task? Without visual feedback.