← Back to context

Comment by simonw

5 months ago

Pelican generated via OpenRouter: https://gist.github.com/simonw/cc4ca7815ae82562e89a9fdd99f07...

Solid bird, not a great bicycle frame.

42 comments

simonw

Reply
btown  5 months ago

Thank you for continuing to maintain the only benchmarking system that matters!

Context for the unaware: https://simonwillison.net/tags/pelican-riding-a-bicycle/

  • gabiruh  5 months ago

    It's interesting how some features, such as green grass, a blue sky, clouds, and the sun, are ubiquitous among all of these models' responses.

    • derefr  5 months ago

      It is odd, yeah.

      I'm guessing both humans and LLMs would tend to get the "vibe" from the pelican task, that they're essentially being asked to create something like a child's crayon drawing. And that "vibe" then brings with it associations with all the types of things children might normally include in a drawing.

  • l_eo  5 months ago

    They will start to max this benchmark as well at some point.

    • ljm  5 months ago

      It's not a benchmark though, right? Because there's no control group or reference.

      It's just an experiment on how different models interpret a vague prompt. "Generate an SVG of a pelican riding a bicycle" is loaded with ambiguity. It's practically designed to generate 'interesting' results because the prompt is not specific.

      It also happens to be an example of the least practical way to engage with an LLM. It's no more capable of reading your mind than anyone or anything else.

      I argue that, in the service of AI, there is a lot of flexibility being created around the scientific method.

      3 replies →

  • segmondy  5 months ago

    This is actually a good benchmark, I use to roll my eyes at it. Then I decided to apply the same idea and ask the models to generate SVG image of "something" not going to put it out there. There was a strong correlation between how good the models are and the image they generated. These were also no vision images, so I don't know if you are serious but this is a decent benchmark.

hasperdi  5 months ago

That's a bike that's ergonomically designed for pelicans.

It is unreasonable to expect pelicans to ride human bikes, they have different anatomy.

  • MrsPeaches  5 months ago

    The next frontier:

    Draw a pelican on a bicycle ergonomically designed for pelicans.

    • ben_w  5 months ago

      It may be a joke, but I think this is correct.

      For reasons, I have tried to get Stable Diffusion to put parrots into spacesuits. Always ended up with the beak coming out where the visor glass should've been, either no wings at all or wings outside the suit, legs and torso just human-shaped.

      ChatGPT got the helmet right, but their wings and tail (and sometimes claws) were exposed to vacuum, still very much closer to a human in either a normal or scifi space suit that happens to also be wearing a parrot head inside the space suit, and has tacked some costume wings on the outside.

      Essentially, it's got the same category of wrong as fantasy art's approach to what women's armour should look like: aesthetics are great, but it would be instantly lethal if done for real.

    • simonw  5 months ago

      My more advanced prompt, for when models do a good job on the original, is this one:

      > Generate an SVG of a California brown pelican riding a bicycle. The bicycle must have spokes and a correctly shaped bicycle frame. The pelican must have its characteristic large pouch, and there should be a clear indication of feathers. The pelican must be clearly pedaling the bicycle. The image should show the full breeding plumage of the California brown pelican.

RC_ITR  5 months ago

The bird not having wings, but all of us calling it a 'solid bird' is one of the most telling examples of the AI expectations gap yet. We even see its own reasoning say it needs 'webbed feet' which are nowhere to be found in the image.

This pattern of considering 90% accuracy (like the level we've seemingly we've stalled out on for the MMLU and AIME) to be 'solved' is really concerning for me.

AGI has to be 100% right 100% of the time to be AGI and we aren't being tough enough on these systems in our evaluations. We're moving on to new and impressive tasks toward some imagined AGI goal without even trying to find out if we can make true Artificial Niche Intelligence.

solarized  5 months ago

This Pelican benchmark has become irrelevant. SVG is already ubiquitous.

We need a new, authentic scenario.

  • echelon  5 months ago 

      1. Take the top ten searches on Google Trends 
     (on day of new model release)
  2. Concatenate
  3. SHA-1 hash them
  4. Use this as a seed to perform random noun-verb 
     lookup in an agreed upon large sized dictionary. 
  5. Construct a sentence using an agreed upon stable 
     algorithm that generates reasonably coherent prompts
     from an immensely deep probability space.

    That's the prompt. Every existing model is given that prompt and compared side-by-side.

    You can generate a few such sentences for more samples.

    Alternatively, take the top ten F500 stock performers. Some easy signal that provides enough randomness but is easy to agree upon and doesn't provide enough time to game.

    It's also something teams can pre-generate candidate problems for to attempt improvement across the board. But they won't have the exact questions on test day.

TZubiri  5 months ago

The idea at the time is that it was obviously not part of the training set, now that it's a metric,it's worthless. Try an elephant smoking s cigar on the beach

pwython  5 months ago

How many pelican riding bicycle SVGs were there before this test existed? What if the training data is being polluted with all these wonky results...

  • bwilliams18  5 months ago

    I'd argue that a models ability to ignore/manage/sift through the noise added to the training set from other LLMs increases in importance and value as time goes on.

  • nerdsniper  5 months ago

    You're correct. It's not as useful as it (ever?) was as a measure of performance...but it's fun and brings me joy.