5 ms·
I am growing tired of these pelicans posts every time a new model is published. Feels to me like low effort personal brand promotion. Just sharing my 2 cents.
by rednb 3mo ago
I am growing tired of these pelicans posts every time a new model is published. Feels to me like low effort personal brand promotion. Just sharing my 2 cents.
- tomrod 3mo agoIts a nice benchmark. Like hearing the ice cream truck on a summer day.
- risyachka 3mo agoAt this point it does not show anything as models are fine tuned on all kinds of benchmarks.
- SoMomentary 3mo agoI thought the Gemini 3.5 Flash Lite response was quite telling myself. I personally like the Pelican SVG test, to me it is still a charming snapshot of model performance anecdata. No one would argue it's rigorous but I don't think it was ever intended to be. I get people burning out on the pelican SVG test alongside the rest of the AI burnout, but I guess for myself I'm just choosing to keep enjoying it while I still can.
- hypfer 3mo agoIt's both. I agree to rednb that at this point it feels like rather obvious brand building, but also, I agree with you that some value is in it. It does not feel all that authentic though, and it's good to react allergically to lack of authenticity. Bad for a lot of business models, but good for humanity.
- squidbeak 3mo agoSorry mate, but you sound jealous in all these replies that the Pelican domain isn't your gig. The below is as labored as nitpicks ever get: > It does not feel all that authentic though, and it's good to react allergically to lack of authenticity. Bad for a lot of business models, but good for humanity. I hope SimonW keeps them coming.
- hypfer 3mo agoMy ancestors are smiling at me, Imperials. Can you say the same?
- neutronicus 3mo agoEvery parent groans haha
- tomashubelbauer 3mo agoMore like living next to an ice cream truck car park
- gr_norm 3mo agoYeah. It's something I can do myself in a couple seconds if I want, also on more varied SVG scenes. If this is going to be a benchmark people turn to I'd like to see more effort put into it than just a one-sentence prompt.
- deleted 3mo ago[deleted]
- IshKebab 3mo agoYeah and it's surely in the training data by now. Long past time to stop.
- miloignis 3mo agoYou say that, and yet 3.5 Flash-Lite produced an SVG without a pelican.
- GaggiX 3mo agoI like seeing the pelicans, it's a tradition.
- xyzsparetimexyz 3mo ago[flagged]
- FuckButtons 3mo agoMy 2 cents: you don’t have to look at the pelican if you don’t want to.
- x187463 3mo agoAt this point, it's kind of a hackernews thing. Simon posts them as a single comment in the relevant thread. It's okay for this place to have a little bit of a sense of community, and you can just ignore the comment.
- bayganyo 3mo agoI feel the same way. It was fun at first but has gotten tiresome. Does anyone actually use these models to generate SVGs?
- isatty 3mo agoYeah I don’t get it. It tells me which model can draw an svg of a pelican riding a bicycle. It does a great job at that and the presentation is good. But why is this an indication of literally anything else?
- zymhan 3mo agoIt is simply a benchmark. It is well known that benchmarks are not meant to apply to every possible task you might perform.
- mpyne 3mo agoYes
- vitorgrs 3mo agoYes? And even for simple interactions, they use SVG by default.
- busymichael 3mo agoI think you're underweighting the Pelican test. Not only does it give you a super easy-to-grok understanding of the model quality just by looking at the image, but when you compare tokens and costs (both input and output), you really get a good, simple COST x QUALITY evaluation across models. Simon explains it well: https://simonwillison.net/2026/Jul/16/kimi-k3/#what-can-we-learn-from-the-pelican- https://simonwillison.net/2026/Jul/16/kimi-k3/#what-can-we-l... Simon, you should put up a summary table page that you update after every release.
- bubble_niter 3mo agoA new model arrives. The pelican, with uncanny commercial instinct, is never far behind. Sponsored blogs and paid newsletters are after all, notoriously poor at subsisting on silence :)
- simonw 3mo agoLinking directly to the rendered markdown as opposed to a post on my blog is a poor way to promote my blog.
- bubble_niter 2mo agoAh yes, because the hyperlink bypasses the homepage, none of this is promotion. Marketing, apparently, is a property of URLs rather than outcomes :)
- simonw 3mo agoYou and a few other people, but enough people still appreciate the bit that I'm going to keep doing it. They're easy enough to skip - click the little "-" icon and you'll collapse the entire sub-thread.
- hypfer 3mo ago[flagged]
- simonw 3mo agoI did hit a nerve. I don't like being accused of posting comments here for "low effort personal brand promotion" or nefarious financial motives.
- hypfer 3mo agoWell, yeah. No one does. But, also, as said, you're an industry (and foss!) veteran, so I find it impossible to believe that you haven't had your fair share of baseless bullshit being thrown at you, and with that, you gaining a persona that will not be hit by that, because it clearly knows that it is in fact bullshit. Unless of course it doesn't really know that with certainty. As said, I would _love_ to give you the benefit of the doubt, because you might just have a stressful day or whatever, but content marketing is literally your whole thing by now. It is impossible for me to do that with a clean conscience. Your blog front page currently opens with > Earlier this month I hosted a fireside chat session at the AI Engineer World’s Fair with Cat Wu and Thariq Shihipar from Anthropic’s Claude Code team. That is not what "some rando foss maintainer we are morally obligated to be soft with" does. But I repeat myself.
- simonw 3mo agoI'm a professional blogger now. I still also work on open source software. I'm even fine being called an "influencer" (shudder), but I take offense to accusations of unethical behavior. I think very hard about the ethics of what I'm doing and how I can best use my "platform" (shudder again) in as constructive a way as possible.
- theowaway213456 3mo agoBut how else am I supposed to know when we've reached AGI, until I see an absolutely flawless pelican? All of the pelicans so far have had really weird flaws / quirks so I am always a little interested to see how well these models perform at this task, since I've seen all the past pelicans and have some anchoring. Seeing a truly flawless pelican would tell me that the model has true visual reasoning capabilities as well as good taste.
- magicalhippo 3mo agoPerhaps freshen it up and extend the test by feeding the model the rendered output so it can iterate once. Assuming a multi-modal model.
- squidbeak 3mo agoDisagree. They're a nice tradition, but besides that, they're a useful way of eyeballing improvements. I realise labs are likely to be training for Pelicans - but if they're all training for them, the differences in the results are as indicative as they were before labs trained for them. The 3.6 Flash pelican is just about the best I've seen.
- BeetleB 3mo agoI love them. Keep 'em coming.
- netdur 3mo agoDo something instead of complain
- EstanislaoStan 3mo agoVibe code an extension that autocollapses any post mentioning pelicans and by simonw?
- Der_Einzige 3mo agoI've been close to writing one that will automatically upvote ALL downvoted posts. I'd call it something like Anti-echochamber.HN
- peder 3mo agoAll the models do this well. It's a test that tell us nothing at this point.
- andybak 3mo agoI'm happy for Simon to post what he wants, when he wants. He's earned it.
- nullgeo 3mo agoHard disagree. I love a little bit of whimsy (which I feel the world is lacking more and more everyday) from Simon everytime a new model is announced.
- reinitctxoffset 3mo agoI'll split the difference. When it's a blog post there's usually an interesting observation or two, but if it's totally automated? Maybe just do the ones with a post.
- justinhj 3mo agoI find Simon's work informative and entertaining; the last thing he can be accused of is low effort. The Pelicans are just a bit of fun icing on top.
- purple-leafy 3mo agoSending a one sentence prompt to an LLM and posting it to hackernews constantly isn’t low effort? Today I learnt something new
- justinhj 2mo agoif that's all he did sure, he makes an interesting blog nearly every day jealous or what?
- rjh29 3mo agoIt's just how he is. Prior to LLMs he was cramming a datasette link into every thread. Downvote and move on.
- zuzululu 3mo agoYour comment reads very pedantic with a hint of jealousy. The pelican and xbox controllers are great ways to see how well it can follow direction dealing with svg a difficult format for LLMs to use and testing their spatial vision awareness.
- jwrallie 3mo agoHere is a different opinion. I’m always looking forward to see the pelican whenever a new model is released. It’s plain simple to understand, memorable, subtle enough in terms of details, and my favorite part is that you have been doing them consistently long enough for it to be useful for comparing almost everything with anything.
- deleted 2mo ago[deleted]
- theshrike79 2mo agoI want to start a new benchmark: "hacker news commenter saying they are tired of pelicans on bicycles" :D