Comment by fwipsy

I'd like to see a human create a better pelican SVG without being able to look at the results. LLMs are language models, not (natively) vision models*. That's why it's a good benchmark: it engages LLM's logical reasoning in a way that we can check visually. The fact that they make errors which can be spotted visually, doesn't prove that LLMs are so far behind humans on language/logic tasks.

Besides which, "fundamental understanding" isn't a binary. Humans can also have a deep understanding of a subject and still make errors. (I do, anyways.) I do not think "fundamental understanding" is itself well enough understood to say definitively that LLMs do or do not have it.

*Some models have multimodal capabilities but these are separate weights, I believe it's only engaged in processing images. From the reasoning trace, the model never rendered the result -- only instructed the user to do so. I welcome correction if I'm wrong, I only have a surface-level understanding here.