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Comment by bel8

6 days ago

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?

    • That's what I've been doing - trying different animals in different vehicles. I'd love to find a lab who does a good pelican on a bicycle but sucks at other combinations, but sadly that's not happened yet.

      Google Gemini have openly boasted about their animals on vehicles results! https://x.com/JeffDean/status/2024525132266688757

  • 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.