Comment by simonw
6 days ago
Claude Sonnet 5 itself described its pelican as looking like a goose:
> Illustration of a white goose riding a bicycle, with one wing extended forward to grip the handlebar, set against a plain white background with a brown ground line.
That's possibly the worst pelican I saw from all recent LLMs.
Meanwhile GLM 5.2 drew a cool self-contained fully animated SVG pelican:
https://simonwillison.net/2026/Jun/17/glm-52
Yeah, GLM have been beating Anthropic on the pelicans for a while now.
(I suspect that's more of an indication that Anthropic have chosen not to waste resources training on animals riding vehicles, personally.)
This is interesting, I haven’t actually heard you suggest that the labs are focusing on this benchmark before. Have you come around to this position as a result of the quality of pelicans you’ve been getting?
The reason I thought this was an interesting benchmark is because it’s a non-image generating model creating an image using SVG code, so it kinda spans capabilities.
If an AI lab trained a model specifically for animals riding bicycles it seem trivial to modify the prompt and determine if it was trained specifically for that or if it’s generalized a skill and can also generate a proper orangutan walking on stilts or an armadillo on a skateboard, this sort of thing?
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That's one possibility albeit quite charitable. I'd be inclined to think the same personally if GLM 5.2 wasn't also rocking in other areas too.
Just need the legs to interact with the pedals now :D
That's something that Sonnet 5 couldn't get right even on a static SVG.
Mine is to ask it to write a parallel parking simulator and animation. The math there is surprisingly complex including differential equations. Fable 5 can almost one shot it with all tunable params.