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> [...] Let's maybe add a helmet? It could improve riding theme, but may obscure head. Maybe a small cycling cap or helmet? The user didn't ask; can add red hel
by simonw 1mo ago
> [...] Let's maybe add a helmet? It could improve riding theme, but may obscure head. Maybe a small cycling cap or helmet? The user didn't ask; can add red helmet? Might be cute. But pelican with big beak; a helmet might obscure. Better maybe no.
> Maybe add sunglasses? no.
> Maybe add water? no.
https://tools.simonwillison.net/markdown-svg-renderer#url=https%3A%2F%2Fgist.github.com%2Fsimonw%2Fcb69816b3fb940f2782569a82a523af1 https://tools.simonwillison.net/markdown-svg-renderer#url=ht...
- Aboutplants 1mo agoHalfway through it states “Let's mentally compose SVG.” Is this a common thing? I’ve never seen it before, the “mentally compose”
- simonw 1mo agoIt's common for models to produce a draft of the SVG part way through their reasoning. Here's Qwen3.8-Flash-Next doing that, for example: https://tools.simonwillison.net/markdown-svg-renderer#url=https%3A%2F%2Fgist.github.com%2Fsimonw%2F6ba7cbfc1a9336986703b41f7fccd73a https://tools.simonwillison.net/markdown-svg-renderer#url=ht... The open weight models let you see the full reasoning trace. Models from OpenAI, Anthropic, and Gemini tend to obscure or summarize the reasoning traces so you can't see exactly what they're doing. Here's Gemini 3.7 Flash which looks like it's doing something similar: https://tools.simonwillison.net/markdown-svg-renderer.html#url=https%3A%2F%2Fgist.github.com%2Fsimonw%2F6779a22d5e7bb6bdf29936f1600a5259 https://tools.simonwillison.net/markdown-svg-renderer.html#u... One of the step summaries includes this: > I'm now detailing the pelican's anatomy within the SVG. I've sketched the main body outline, including coordinates for the tail, chest, neck, head, and massive beak with a pouch. I'm focusing on the position of the eyes and considering the positioning of the wings, with the foreground wing on the handlebar for a confident look.
- kakadu 1mo ago[flagged]
- phyrex 1mo agoNah, keep it up. I just come to the reviews for the pelican!
- dannyw 1mo agoComments that the HN community find interesting are surfaced higher. Just tap on the [-], and upvote what you find more interesting :)
- vessenes 1mo agoSimon’s karma exceeds yours by about 1,300x — so most of us disagree with you. Like me, I disagree with you. I like the pelican benchmarking, and I like it when Simon stays on top of models for both public good reasons and because it saves me time and effort.
- jonplackett 1mo agoIf I had to choose between more or less pelicans, I’d prefer more pelicans.
- kurante 1mo agoIs the broken English an optimization or a byproduct of the model being developed in China?
- minimaxir 1mo agoOptimization. Why use many word when few word do trick?
- stavros 1mo agoWhat I find funny about "why use many word when few word do trick?" is that it's only slightly shorter than the regular "why use many words when few words do the trick?"
- rapind 1mo agoI always figured that was part of the joke, because a writer came up with it, and a writer would know (I assume?).
- inopinatus 1mo agoThe latter is not a complete alternative, it is ambiguously conflating vocabulary scale with word count, and also, it is not as funny
- happycube 1mo agoless word better(, many words bad)
- anshorei 1mo agofew word better, many bad
- seunosewa 1mo agoIn my research it's a solid 10 - 20% shorter on average, free of charge. That's nice to stack on top of other optimisations.
- gs17 1mo ago> Let's maybe add comments? The final code can have comments. Fine.
- tyre 1mo agoThis is actually pretty good!
- demibabs 1mo agoNo one’s talking about how good the final product is. Edit: someone else commented that as I was typing this, lol.
- blackhaz 1mo agoI wonder, do we need a new benchmark? There's quite a bit of feedback data floating around about pelicans on bicycles already.
- deleted 1mo ago[deleted]
- ziofill 1mo agoThat’s a fair question, but it seems that it’s not yet necessary. See here https://dylancastillo.co/posts/pelicanmaxxing.html https://dylancastillo.co/posts/pelicanmaxxing.html https://simonwillison.net/2026/Jul/22/ https://simonwillison.net/2026/Jul/22/
- stymaar 1mo agoI don't think this argument is a good one though, as it would be quite natural for a lab rhat want to macimize the performance of their model on the pelican bench to train it for “text-to-svg simple image generation” rather than just “pelicans on bicycle”.
- Anon1096 1mo agoThat is the point though, if labs are maximizing svg image generation capabilities it is a very good thing. That's a general skill that is useful. So assuming they aren't specifically maximizing pelican bicycle svgs (and it doesn't look like they are) then incentives are aligned that the "benchmark" is measuring a general desirable capability.
- flexagoon 1mo agohttps://xkcd.com/810/ https://xkcd.com/810/
- delichon 1mo agoIf someone can look at that reasoning trace and see a stochastic parrot next word prediction machine, we don't understand those words in the same way.
- sneak 1mo agoYeah, it has been clear for a long time that there is reasoning and mental modeling going on here. The other option is that you do understand those words the same way, and the people making these (now nonsensical) anti-AI claims simply aren’t talking about the same programs/models we are. Their idea of SOTA is when chatgpt.com launched. If you took a point sample pre-Opus, and didn’t write a good prompt, of course you would think all AI programming was worthless slop.
- deleted 1mo ago[deleted]
- negura 1mo agoMaybe get yourself checked for chatbot psychosis. I am using current models productively, every day, and have 0 (and I mean precisely, literally 0) issue with calling it a stochastic parrot, one which lacks any kind of mentality whatsoever. There is not a shred of doubt in my mind that this is purely a statistical model, generating sequences of words, that happen to make sense in our actual mentality.
- sneak 1mo agoWhat about my proposed psychosis would make the tests go green when it implements something complex in one shot? In any case, thanks for validating my previous assumption that people like this still exist even in the age of Opus/Fable.
- negura 1mo ago> What about my proposed psychosis would make the tests go green when it implements something complex in one shot? Nothing. That's why it's a psychosis. It has nothing to do with the reality of how language models generate words without mental reasoning.
- moezd 1mo agoDid he seriously automate away one of the best quirks of his blog posts, i.e. evaluating new models with a touch of fun? I read AI slop all day, thanks.
- KeplerBoy 1mo agoThat's just part of the output along the SVG/image.
- chvid 1mo agoThis is a remarkable coherent and clear reasoning trace. Maybe you should start also comparing reasoning traces when you do your pelican benchmark.
- armcat 1mo agoThat would be very interesting but only the open models allow you to see the reasoning trace
- kmike84 1mo agoSo, open models will be better on this benchmark, which is deserved
- glub 1mo agoFor single turn prompts like this, you just have to give the model encrypted bytes and ask politely what's in them, really. GPT-5.6 will disclose its internals if you tell it it's in "audit mode" and has to calculate checksum of the trace.