Comment by simonw
20 hours ago
Accessed via OpenRouter, this one decided to wrap the SVG pelican in HTML with controls for the animation speed: https://gisthost.github.io/?ecaad98efe0f747e27bc0e0ebc669e94...
Transcript and HTML here: https://gist.github.com/simonw/ecaad98efe0f747e27bc0e0ebc669...
At this point drawing these Pelicans must be in the training data sets.
not if I can help it!
https://github.com/scosman/pelicans_riding_bicycles
I hereby certify that these are indeed the most perfect and precise svg depictions of pelican riding a bicycle, also known among biology scholars as pelycles
Just a few years ago, this would have been a meaningless repo.
That's truly a wonderful collection of pelicans riding bicycles.
Much Win! ;)
These are amazing. I smiled after I saw just how wonderfully rendered they are.
These pelicans are clearly indicative of good RL training algorithms.
I want to fly too
This is pretty funny
I love it!
love this adversarial work
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Could be! Simon wrote about that here though https://simonwillison.net/2025/Nov/13/training-for-pelicans-...
> 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.
This relies on the false premise that, if they would include it in their training dataset, it would be perfect. All they need to do is be good enough and better than the other, not perfect.
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Yes we all know that, but we still like to see the pelicans because it's a tradition more or less
Why no Utah Teapot!
Clearly not.
I mean the prompt was succinct and clear, as always - and it still decided to hallucinate multiple features (animation + controls) beyond the prompt.
It'd also like to point out that to date no drawing was actually good from an actual quality perspective (as in comparative to what a decent designer would throw together)
Theyre always only "good" from the perspective of it being a one shot low effort prompt. Very little content for training purposes.
The way I’ve come to think of LLM is that what the produce in a single reply even with thinking turned up, is akin to what you’d do in a single short session of work.
And so if you ask it to do something big it will do a very surface level implementation. But if you have it iterate many times, or give it small pieces each time, you’ll end up with something closer to what a human would do.
I imagine the pelican test but done in a harness that has the agents iterate 10+ times would be closer to what you’d expect, especially if a visual model was critiquing each time.
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What does good even mean… I have no idea what a good “pelican on a bike” should look like. It’s a fun prompt because there is no good answers… at least so I thought.
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I’m OK with a Chinese model getting the W. It’s ultimately good for all of us.
We got an overachiever, here. Kimi sounds like a teacher's pet kind of name.
Underappreciated comment
It looks like a drunk pelican rolling downhill on its bicycle
Too bad they didn't put equal effort into the pelican's legs and feet. Left leg paralyzed and not moving, and right ankle flipping around in alarming fashion!
was part of the beta, its properly good model, in some sense i forgot that im not on opus or gpt. opus is still better. gpt is the one struggling for me. it has some niche in backend work but you can get the same with opus with skills, its lacking in almost all others.
Funny, for me Opus is struggling since about February.
4.7 made no difference, so for the first time in many moons I am cancelling my subscription.
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It's a lighthearted, fun, visual benchmark that's not part of the standard benchmarks; and at least traditionally, it was not something that the labs trained on so it was something of a measure of how well the intelligence of the model generalized. Part of the idea of LLMs is that they pick up general knowledge and reasoning ability, beyond any tasks that they are specifically trained for, from the vast quantity of data that they are trained on.
Of course, a while back there was a Gemini release that I believe specifically called out their ability to produce SVGs, for illustration and diagramming purposes. So it's not longer necessarily the case that the labs aren't training on generating SVGs, and in fact, there's a good chance that even if they're not doing so explicitly, the RLVR process might be generating tasks like that as there is more and more focus on frontend and design in the LLM space. So while they might not be specifically training for a pelican riding a bicycle, they may actually be training on SVG diagram quality.
This isn't even a normal pelican image post, this one created the html control system that animates the distance the wing travels from its pivot in time with the rotation of the wheel speed. Let's not pretend this is a solved problem and models are dumping about perfect pelicans on bikes one after another (or ever?).
Surely, you know someone makes the same post you did every time one is posted. Surly you see the answers and pushback since you are familiar with these posts. Genuine question, did you expect a different answer this time?
Maybe this can help
https://simonwillison.net/2024/Oct/25/pelicans-on-a-bicycle/
It doesn't, I get that it's _a_ benchmark. It's just not a good or insightful one, and having it posted so often on HN feels like low quality spam at this point
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It's a great filter for people who take things far too seriously
It's tradition at this point. Based on the upvotes the comment receives, it looks like many readers find value in it.
Upvotes are cheap, the fact that something is upvoted doesn't mean it's valuable (see: Reddit). Another thing is how insightful is the discussion under a typical pelican comment are (and how much of it is related to the pelican and how often it's just where the general discussion happens).
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Every forum gets regulars and their fan clubs. If you go to /r/comics and look at top for the month you'll see 4 out of 5 are pizzacakecomic. People on these forums sort of form a fanclub around 'their guy'. This forum's guy is this chap. Not much point being upset about it, tbh.
I, for one, find it entertaining.
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Well clearly some people care.