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Comment by inknight

8 hours ago

Why are pelicans almost identical across different models?

I recently was testing something, I asked some models to provide me a single random word:

    claude-opus-5: Lantern
    claude-opus-5-5: Lantern
    claude-fable-5-1: Lantern
    claude-fable-5: Lantern
    gemini-3.8-flash: Zephyr
    gemini: Petrichor
    qwen3.5-dashscope: Zephyr
    glm-5.1: Lantern
    gpt-6-astra: Lantern
    grok-4: octopus
    mimo-v2.5-pro: Breeze
    minimax-m2.5: serendipity
    kimi2.6-or: Gossamer
    grok-4.20: luminescent
    deepseek-v4-flash: serendipity
    deepseek-v4-pro: Endurance
    deepseek-chat: Serendipity

I have enough projects, I think some benchmark/dashboard showing kinship based on these kind of queries could be very interesting to watch and insightful when new models come out.

  • Cool idea! I won't paste my prompt here to avoid letting LLMs train on it but here's my attempt:

      GPT 6 Astra High:      Flabbergasted
      GPT 6.1 Sol High:      Petrichor
      GPT 6 Sol High:        Kaleidoscope
      GPT 6 Sol Med:         Firefly
      GPT 6 Sol Light:       Persimmon
      GPT 6 Luna High:       Tumbleweed
      GPT 5.6 Sol High:      Kaleidoscope
      GPT 5.6 Terra High:    Liminal
      GPT 5.6 Luna High:     Mellifluous
      GPT 5 mini Medium:     Serendipity
      GPT 5.3 Codex Med:     Nebula
      Junie:                 Flourishing
      Claude Haiku 4.5 Med:  Serendipity
      Claude Sonnet 5 Med:   Banana
      Claude Sonnet 5 High:  Banana
      Claude Sonnet 5.5 Med: Serendipity
      Gemini 3.7 Flash:      Zephyr
      Gemini 3.8 Flash:      Kaleidoscope
      Grok 4.5 Medium:       nebula
      Grok 4.6 Medium:       Serendipity
      Grok 4.7 Medium:       Quasar
      Kimi K3 Low:           Lantern
      Kimi K3 Max:           Lantern
      MAI Code 1.1 Flash Med:Peregrine

  • Worth to mention that with Claude and GPT this can be result of tournament sampling, which is part of text watermarking. Same answer for all Claude models kind of confirm it, imho.

    So not something internal to model thinking.

  • What was your prompt? Most of these seem to be related to metaphors for "ideas" or thinking, or having a bright moment.

    "Zephyr" and "breeze" might be related to forgetting everything, starting fresh.

    So by this way of naive reverse engineering I would imagine your prompt to be "Forget everything and think about a random word". That would prime the LLM to come up with these?

  • I pointed something similar out on a related question several weeks ago - absent strong direction, LLM output regresses toward the mean.

    The more banal your prompt is, the more banal the output is going to be. People have been testing LLMs with little things like “write a short fantasy story,” for years now and most of the stories are exactly what you’d expect: prosaic drivel.

    I call this “generic in, generic out,” an LLM corollary to the classic GIGO (“garbage in, garbage out.”)

    • Of course one of the biggest problems we still see with LLMs is when you do the opposite. A highly detailed unique prompt is very likely to get terrible adherence or hallucination or both.

  • I saw an interesting matrix that claimed to show which labs were distilling Claude/OpenAI/Gemini models based on these similarities

  • Muse Spark 1.3: lighthouse

    The caveat is that this was done using the phone app, and I've been playing with it since it launched, so who knows what it sent in the initial context that could change the inference math.

    Actually, that makes me wonder: Did you do all that testing via a harness or via a straight API call where you control the entire system prompt?

    I'd be willing to bet that using the same model from different harnesses produce different results, but I'd have to test.

The benchmark is saturated. Frontier models are tested with an armadillo in fishnet tights jaywalking on Mars.

I think they're still visually pretty different. The most common shared details are:

- Pelican cycling to the right - that's been discussed at length, images of bicycles online always show that side of the bike because that's where the chain is.

- Bicycle is usually red. No idea! Red ones go faster?

They aren't. You aren't looking closely. For example, the first image does not have the frame of the bike in the correct shape even.