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Pretty great pelican: https://simonwillison.net/2026/Feb/19/gemini-31-pro/ https://simonwillison.net/2026/Feb/19/gemini-31-pro/ - took over 5 minutes though, bu
by simonw 9mo ago
Pretty great pelican: https://simonwillison.net/2026/Feb/19/gemini-31-pro/ https://simonwillison.net/2026/Feb/19/gemini-31-pro/ - took over 5 minutes though, but I think that's because they're having performance teething problems on launch day.
- bredren 9mo agoWhat is that, a snack in the basket?
- WarmWash 9mo agoA fish for the road
- sigmar 9mo ago"integrating a bicycle basket, complete with a fish for the pelican... also ensuring the basket is on top of the bike, and that the fish is correctly positioned with its head up... basket is orange, with a fish inside for fun." how thoughtful of the ai to include a snack. truly a "thanks for all the fish"
- defen 9mo agoA pelican already has an integrated snack-holder, though. It wouldn't need to put it in the basket.
- SauntSolaire 9mo agoThat one's full too
- troymc 9mo agoThe number of snacks in the basket is a random variable with a Poisson distribution.
- xnx 9mo agoNot even animated? This is 2026.
- readitalready 9mo agoJeff Dean just posted an animated version: https://x.com/JeffDean/status/2024525132266688757 https://x.com/JeffDean/status/2024525132266688757
- bigfishrunning 9mo agoThat Ostrich Tho
- cachius 9mo agoThat Tires Tho
- benbreen 9mo agoOne underrated thing about the recent frontier models, IMO, is that they are obviating the need for image gen as a standalone thing. Opus 4.6 (and apparently 3.1 Pro as well) doesn't have the ability to generate images but it is so good at making SVG that it basically doesn't matter at this point. And the benefit of SVG is that it can be animated and interactive. I find this fascinating because it literally just happened in the past few months. Up until ~summer of 2025, the SVG these models made was consistently buggy and crude. By December of 2026, I was able to get results like this from Opus 4.5 (Henry James: the RPG, made almost entirely with SVG): https://the-ambassadors.vercel.app https://the-ambassadors.vercel.app And now it looks like Gemini 3.1 Pro has vaulted past it.
- embedding-shape 9mo ago> doesn't have the ability to generate images but it is so good at making SVG that it basically doesn't matter at this point Yeah, since the invention of vector images, suddenly no one cares about raster images anymore. Obviously not true, but that's how your comment reads right now. "Image" is very different from "Image", and one doesn't automagically replace the other.
- calny 9mo agoGreat pelican but what’s up with that fish in the basket?
- coldtea 9mo agoIt's a pelican. What do you expect a pelican to have in his bike's basket? It's a pretty funny and coherent touch!
- embedding-shape 9mo ago> What do you expect a pelican to have in his bike's basket? Probably stuff it cannot fit in the gullet, or don't want there (think trash). I wouldn't expect a pelican to stash fish there, that's for sure.
- kridsdale3 9mo agoYou never travel with a snack fish for later on? He's going to be burning calories.
- ionwake 9mo agohold on guys, what we have here is a cycling pelican expert
- embedding-shape 9mo agoIt takes humanity to be able to get into other's perspectives. It takes experience and wisdom to be able to do so for animals too.
- gavinray 9mo agoWhere else are cycling Pelican's meant to keep their fish?
- calny 9mo agoI get it, I just meant the fish is poorly done, when I’d have guessed it would be relatively simple part. Maybe the black dot eye is misplaced idk.
- embedding-shape 9mo agoIt's an excellent demonstration of the main issue I have with the Gemini family of models, they always go "above and beyond" to do a lot of stuff, even if I explicitly prompt against it. In this case, most of the SVG ends up consisting not just of a bike and a pelican, but clouds, a sun, a hat on the pelican and so much more. Exactly the same thing happens when you code, it's almost impossible to get Gemini to not do "helpful" drive-by-refactors, and it keeps adding code comments no matter what I say. Very frustrating experience overall.
- enobrev 9mo agoI have the same issue. Even when I ask it to do code-reviews and very explicitly tell it not to change files, it will occasionally just start "fixing" things.
- mikepurvis 9mo agoI find Copilot leans the other way. It'll myopically focus its work in the exact function I point it at, even when it's clear that adding a new helper would be a logical abstraction to share behaviour with the function right beside it. Overall, I think it's probably better that it stay focused, and allow me to prompt it with "hey, go ahead and refactor these two functions" rather than the other way around. At the same time, really the ideal would be to have it proactively ask, or even pitch the refactor as a colleague would, like "based on what I see of this function, it would make most sense to XYZ, do you think that makes sense? <sure go ahead> <no just keep it a minimal change>" Or perhaps even better, simply pursue both changes in parallel and present them as A/B options for the human reviewer to select between.
- gavinray 9mo agoDo you have Personalization Instructions set up for your LLM models? You can make their responses fairly dry/brief.
- embedding-shape 9mo agoI'm mostly using them via my own harnesses, so I have full control of the system prompts and so on. And no matter what I try, Gemini keeps "helpfully" adding code comments every now and then. With every other model, "- Don't add code comments" tends to be enough, but with Gemini I'm not sure how I could stop the comments from eventually appearing.
- Arcuru 9mo agoDid you stop using the more detailed prompt? I think you described it here: https://simonwillison.net/2025/Nov/18/gemini-3/ https://simonwillison.net/2025/Nov/18/gemini-3/
- steve_adams_86 9mo agoUgh, the gears and chain don't mesh and there's no sprocket on the rear hub But seriously, I can't believe LLMs are able to one-shot a pelican on a bicycle this well. I wouldn't have guessed this was going to emerge as a capability from LLMs 6 years ago. I see why it does now, but... It still amazes me that they're so good at some things.
- HPsquared 9mo agoAnd the left leg is straight while the right leg is bent. EDIT: And the chain should pass behind the seat stay.
- emp17344 9mo agoIs this capability “emergent”, or do AI firms specifically target SVG generation in order to improve it? How would we be able to tell?
- simonw 9mo agoGoogle specifically boast about their SVG performance in the announcement post: https://blog.google/innovation-and-ai/models-and-research/gemini-models/gemini-3-1-pro/ https://blog.google/innovation-and-ai/models-and-research/ge... You can try any combination of animal on vehicle to confirm that they likely didn't target pelicans directly though.
- steve_adams_86 9mo agoI asked myself the same thing as I typed that comment, and I'm not sure what the answer is. I don't think models are specifically trained on this (though of course they're trained on how to generate SVGs in general), but I'm prepared to be wrong. I have a feeling the most 'emergent' aspect was that LLMs have generally been able to produce coherent SVG for quite a while, likely without specific training at first. Since then I suspect there has been more tailored training because improvements have been so dramatic. Of course it makes sense that text-based images using very distinct structure and properties could be manipulated reasonably well by a text-based language model, but it's still fascinating to me just how well it can work. Perhaps what's most incredible about it is how versatile human language is, even when it lacks so many dimensions as bits on a machine. Yet it's still cool that we can resurrect those bits at rest and transmogrify them back into coherent projections of photons from a screen. I don't think LLMs are AGI or about to completely flip the world upside down or whatever, but it seems undeniably magical when you break it down.
- mohsen1 9mo agois there something in your prompt about hats? why the pelican always wearing a hat recently?!
- bigfishrunning 9mo agoAt this point, i think maybe they're training on all of the previous pelicans, and one of them decided to put a hat on it? Disclaimer: This is an unsubstantiated claim that i made up
- sam_1421 9mo agoModels are soon going to start benchmaxxing generating SVGs of pelicans on bikes
- embedding-shape 9mo agoSoon? I'd be willing to bet it's been included in the training set at least 6 months by now. Not so obvious so it generates always perfect pelicans on bikes, but sufficiently for the "minibench" to be less useful today than in the past.
- deleted 9mo ago[deleted]
- Rudybega 9mo agoIf only there were some way to test it, like swapping the two nouns in the sentence. Alas.
- jsheard 9mo agoSimons been doing this exact test for nearly 18 months now, if vendors want to benchmaxx it then they've had more than enough time to do so already.
- stri8ted 9mo agoExactly. As far as I'm concerned, the benchmark is useless. It's way too easy and rewarding to train on it.
- Legend2440 9mo agoY'all are way too skeptical, no matter what cool thing AI does you'll make up an excuse for how they must somehow be cheating.
- arcatech 9mo agoOr maybe you’re too trusting of companies who have already proven to not be trustworthy?
- saberience 9mo agoI hope we keep beating this dead horse some more, I'm still not tired of it.
- WarmWash 9mo agoLess pretty and more practical, it's really good at outputting circuit designs as SVG schematics. https://www.svgviewer.dev/s/dEdbH8Sw https://www.svgviewer.dev/s/dEdbH8Sw
- 0_____0 9mo agothat's pretty amazing for an LLM but as an EE, if my intern did this i would sigh inwardly and pull up some existing schematics for some brief guidance on symbol layout.
- InitialLastName 9mo agoI don't know what of this is the prompt and what was the output, but that's a pretty bad schematic (for both aesthetic and circuit-design reasons).
- svnt 9mo agoYes but you concede it is a schematic.
- tadfisher 9mo agoHow far we have come!
- WarmWash 9mo agoThe prompts were doing the design, reference voltage, hysteresis, output stage, all the maths and then the SVG is from asking the model to take all that and the current BOM to make an SVG schematic of it. In the past models would just output totally incoherent messes of lines and shapes. I did a larger circuit too that this is part of, but it's not really for sharing online.
- infthi 9mo agoWonder when will we get something other than a side view
- mikepurvis 9mo agoThat would be a especially challenging for vector output. I tried just now on ChatGPT 5.2 to jump straight to an image, with this prompt: "make me a cartoon image of a pelican riding a bicycle, but make it from a front 3/4 view, that is riding toward the viewer." The result was basically a head-on view, but I expect if you then put that back in and said, "take this image and vectorize it as an SVG" you'd have a much better time than trying to one-shot the SVG directly from a description. ... but of course, if that's so, then what's preventing the model from being smart enough to identify this workflow and follow it on its own to get the task completed?
- dekhn 9mo agoAnother Jeff Dean post about this model shows it writing programs that generate CAD objects. I suspect if you ask it to, it will create a CAD pelican on a CAD bicycle and even make joints so you can turn the pedals.
- SoKamil 9mo agoIt seems they trained the model to output good svg’s. In their blog post[1], first use case they mention is svg generation. Thus, it might not be any indicator at all anymore. [1] https://blog.google/innovation-and-ai/models-and-research/gemini-models/gemini-3-1-pro/ https://blog.google/innovation-and-ai/models-and-research/ge...
- MrCheeze 9mo agoDoes anyone understand why LLMs have gotten so good at this? Their ability to generate accurate SVG shapes seems to greatly outshine what I would expect, given their mediocre spatial understanding in other contexts.
- simonw 9mo agoMy best guess is that the labs put a lot of work into HTML and CSS spatial stuff because web frontend is such an important application of the models, and those improvements leaked through to SVG as well.
- pknerd 9mo ago> Does anyone understand why LLMs have gotten so good at this? Added more IF/THEN/ELSE conditions.
- kridsdale3 9mo agoMore wires and jumpers on the breadboard.
- deleted 9mo ago[deleted]
- tedsanders 9mo agoA few thoughts: - One thing to be aware of is that LLMs can be much smarter than their ability to articulate that intelligence in words. For example, GPT-3.5 Turbo was beastly at chess (1800 elo?) when prompted to complete PGN transcripts, but if you asked it questions in chat, its knowledge was abysmal. LLMs don't generalize as well as humans, and sometimes they can have the ability to do tasks without the ability to articulate things that feel essential to the tasks (like answering whether the bicycle is facing left or right). - Secondly, what has made AI labs so bullish on future progress over the past few years is that they see how little work it takes to get their results. Often, if an LLM sucks at something that's because no one worked on it (not always, of course). If you directly train a skill, you can see giant leaps in ability with fairly small effort. Big leaps in SVG creation could be coming from relatively small targeted efforts, where none existed before.
- AmazingTurtle 9mo agoAt this point, the pelican benchmark became so widely used that there must be high quality pelicans in the dataset, I presume. What about generating an okapi on a bicycle instead?
- benatkin 9mo agoI used the AI studio link and tried running it with the temperature set to 1.75: https://jsbin.com/locodaqovu/edit?html,output https://jsbin.com/locodaqovu/edit?html,output
- tarr11 9mo agoWhat do you think this particular prompt is evaluating for? The more popular these particular evals are, the more likely the model will be trained for them.
- Gander5739 9mo agoSea https://simonwillison.net/2025/Nov/13/training-for-pelicans-riding-bicycles/ https://simonwillison.net/2025/Nov/13/training-for-pelicans-...
- DonHopkins 9mo agoHow about STL files for 3d printing pelicans!
- baq 9mo agoHarder: the bike must work Hardest: the pelican must work
- jasonjmcghee 9mo agoWhat's crazy is you've influenced them to spend real effort ensuring their model is good at generating animated svgs of animals operating vehicles. The most absurd benchmaxxing. https://x.com/jeffdean/status/2024525132266688757?s=46&t=ZjF9if4qtE9ppAnug9UOPQ https://x.com/jeffdean/status/2024525132266688757?s=46&t=ZjF...
- tantalor 9mo agoHe's svg-mogging
- eurekin 9mo agoCan't wait until they finally get to real world CAD
- tngranados 9mo agoThere's a CAD example in that same thread: https://x.com/JeffDean/status/2024528776856817813 https://x.com/JeffDean/status/2024528776856817813
- gibspaulding 9mo agoI know this isn’t necessarily “real world CAD” but Claude Code is not too shabby at OpenSCAD.
- gnatolf 9mo agoSo let's put things we're interested in in the benchmarks. I'm not against pelicans!
- ghurtado 9mo agoI think the reason the pelican example is great is because it's bizarre enough that it's unlikely that to appear in the training as one unified picture. If we picked something more common, like say, a hot dog with toppings, then the training contamination is much harder to control.
- TZubiri 9mo agoYou think they are able to see their output and iterate on it? Or is it pure token generation?
- culi 9mo agoCost per task has increased 4.2x but their ARC-AGI-2 score went from 33.6% to 77.1% Cost per task is still significantly lower than Opus. Even Opus 4.5 https://arcprize.org/leaderboard https://arcprize.org/leaderboard
- brikym 9mo agoAnother great benchmark would be to convert a raster image of a logo into SVG. I've yet to find a good tool for this that produces accurate smooth lines.