Going to have to disagree on the backup test. Opus flamingo is actually on the pedals and seat with functional spokes and beak. In terms of adherence to physical reality Qwen is completely off. To me it's a little puzzling that someone would prefer the Qwen output.
I'd say the example actually does (vaguely) suggest that Qwen might be overfitting to the Pelican.
Qwen's flamingo is artistically far more interesting. It's a one-eyed flamingo with sunglasses and a bow tie who smokes pot. Meanwhile Opus just made a boring, somewhat dorky flamingo. Even the ground and sky are more interesting in Qwen's version
But in terms of making something physically plausible, Opus certainly got a lot closer
The fundamental challenge of AI is preventing unprompted creativity. I can spin up a random initialization and call all of it's output avante garde if we want to get creative.
I recently fell down the rabbithole of AI-generated videos, and realised that many of the "flaws" that make them distinctive, such as objects morphing and doing unusual things, would've been nearly impossible or require very advanced CGI to create.
"artistically interesting" is IMHO both a subjective and 'solved' problem. These models are trained with an "artistically interesting" reward model that tries to guide the model towards higher quality photos.
I think getting the models to generate realistic and proportional objects is a much harder and important challenge (remember when the models would generate 6 fingers?).
Even the first one - Qwen added extra details in the background sure. But he Pelican itself is a stork with a bent beak and it's feet is cut off it's legs. While impressive for a local model, I don't think it's a winner.
For coding, qwen 3.6 35b a3b solved 11/98 of the Power Ranking tasks (best-of-two), compared to 10/98 for the same size qwen 3.5. So it's at best very slightly improved and not at all in the class of qwen 3.5 27b dense (26 solved) let alone opus (95/98 solved, for 4.6).
If all models are trained on the benchmark data, you cannot extrapolate the benchmark scores to performance on unseen data, but the ranking of different models still tells you something. A model that solves 95/98 benchmark problems may turn out much worse than that in real life, but probably not much worse than the one that only solved 11/98 despite training on the benchmark problems.
This doesn't hold if some models trained on the benchmark and some didn't, but you can fix this by deliberately fine-tuning all models for the benchmark before comparing them. For more in-depth discussion of this, see https://mlbenchmarks.org/11-evaluating-language-models.html#...
I've been using Qwen 3.5 35B-A3B with images as input so I suspect you perhaps didn't include the vision part of the model during testing (I use llama.cpp and I learned I needed to include the separate mmproj part).
You compare tiny modal for local inference vs propertiary, expensive frontier model. It would be more fair to compare against similar priced model or tiny frontier models like haiku, flash or gpt nano.
I understand the 'fun factor' but at this point I really wonder what this pelican still proofs ? I mean, providers certainly could have adapted for it if they wanted, and if you want to test how well a model adapts to potential out of distribution contexts, it might be more worthwhile to mix different animals with different activity types (a whale on a skateboard) than always the same.
For a delightful moment this morning I thought I might have finally caught a model provider cheating by training for the pelican, but the flamingo convinced me that wasn't the case.
The Opus one looks like a flamingo, and looks like it's riding the unicycle. Sitting on the seat. Feet on the pedals.
The Qwen one looks like a 3-tailed, broken-winged, beakless (I guess? Is that offset white thing a beak? Or is it chewing on a pelican feather like it's a piece of straw?) monstrosity not sitting on the seat, with its one foot off the pedal (the other chopped off at the knee) of a malmanufactured wheel that has bonus spokes that are longer than the wheel.
But yeah, it does have a bowtie and sunglasses that you didn't ask for! Plus it says "<3 Flamingo on a Unicycle <3", which perhaps resolves all ambiguity.
Let's not oversell Opus' output. The Qwen flamingo is flawed but could be easily fixed with 1-2 prompts if you're really upset with it. The Opus SVG is not any better than something that I could make in Inkscape with 3 minutes and sufficient motivation. Calling Opus' flamingo "programmer art" would be an insult to programmers.
If I (commercially) made models I’d put specific care into producing SVGs of various animals doing (riding) various things ... I find it interesting how confident you seem to be that they’re not.
This is a gag that's long outlived its humor, but we're in a space so driven by hype there are people who will unironically take some signal from it. They'll swear up and down they know it's for fun, but let a great pelican come out and see if they don't wave it as proof the model is great alongside their carwash test.
Consider reading the article, which addresses all of the points you raise.
It's directly stated in the post that the entire test is meant to be humorous, not taken seriously, only that is has vaguely followed model performance to date. The author also writes that this new result shows that trend has broken..
Yeah I can imagine these popular benchmarks get special treatment in the training of new models. I wonder how they would perform for "Elephant riding a car" or "Lion sleeping in a bed"
Such a disconnect from the minutes I’ve lost and given up on Gemini trying to get it to update a diagram in a slide today. The one shot joke stuff is great but trying to say “that is close but just make this small change” seems impossible. It’s the gap between toy and tool.
More and more I suspect OpenAI is generating comments on HN to try shift the discussion.
I’m not sure you’re a bot but this is the stereotypical comment being overly critical of anything where OpenAI is not superior or being overly supportive (see comments on the Codex post today) while clearly not understanding the discussed topic at all.
I don't know what such a demo would prove in the first place. LLMs are good at things that they have been trained on, or are analogues of things they have been trained on. SVG generation isn't really an analogue to any task that we usually call on LLMs to do. Early models were bad at it because their training only had poor examples of it. At a certain point model companies decided it would be good PR to be halfway decent at generating SVGs, added a bunch of examples to the finetuning, and voila. They still aren't good enough to be useful for anything, and such improvements don't lead them to be good at anything else - likely the opposite - but it makes for cute demos.
I guess initially it would have been a silly way to demonstrate the effect of model size. But the size of the largest models stopped increasing a while ago, recent improvements are driven principally by optimizing for specific tasks. If you had some secret task that you knew they weren't training for then you could use that as a benchmark for how much the models are improving versus overfitting for their training set, but this is not that.
On thinking about the reasons this may be something at least slightly more than training on the task is the richness with which language is filled with spatial metaphors even in basic language not by laymen considered metaphor outside the field of linguistics proper, in which concepts eg Lakoff's analysis in "Metaphors we Live By and others are simply part of the field, (though unsurprisingly, among the HN crowd I've occasionally seen it brought up)
The amount of money you have in the bank may often "increase" or "decrease" but it also goes up and down, spatial. Concepts can be adjacent to each, orthogonal. Plenty more.
So, as models utilize weight more densely with more complex strategies learned during training the patterns & structure of these metaphors might also be deepened. Hmmm... another thing to add to the heap of future project-- trace down the geometry of activations in older/newer models of similar size with the same prompts containing such metaphors, or these pelican prompts, test the idea so it isn't just arm chair speculation.
> I’m giving this one to Qwen too, partly for the excellent <!-- Sunglasses on flamingo! --> SVG comment
You say you like the one from Qwen better and the only reason you give has nothing to do with the task.
In general, one should provide specific expectations regarding the properties of the image before the experiment. One important property should be "does not hallucinate stuff into the image that are unrelated to the prompt".
I've been using Qwen3.5-35B-A3B for a bit via open code and oMLX on M5 Max with 128Gb of RAM and I have to say it's impressively good for a model of that size. I've seen a huge jump in the quality of the tool calls and how well it handles the agentic workflow.
This is a useless benchmark now a days, every model provider trains their models on making good pelicans. Some have even trained every combination of animal/mode of transportation
I liked both of Opus' better, it was very illuminating, in both cases I didn't see the error's Simon saw and wondered why Simon skipped over the errors I saw.
I really wish they spent some time training for computer use. This model is incapable of finding anywhere near the correct x,y coordinate of a simple object in a picture.
Will Claude constantly be able to deliver more value than rolling your own ?
I think the future is a bunch of just good enough models, which is what most people need. Not top of the line models that require millions in hardware to run
not that I disagree with you in principle but I see this the same was a "cloud" - 10's of thousands of companies could save gazillion dollars by hosting their infrastructure and yet they continue to pay insane amounts of moneys to AWSs and Azures and whatnots. While some company's future may as well be running local models I would venture a guess that vast majority will just eat the costs and pass on as much of it as they can to their customers...
LLM's really causing serious brainrot if html pelican drawings are a usage basis for your programming projects, even all these shitty benchmarks don't say or mean anything if companies secretly tweak them on the go
I literally cannot believe that people are wasting their time doing this either as a benchmark or for fun. After every single language model release, no less.
It feels like the results stopped being interesting a little while ago but the practice has become part of simonw's brand, and it gives him something to post even when there is nothing interesting to say about another incremental improvement to a model, and so I don't imagine he'll stop.
It’s not a waste of time.
As the boundaries of AI are pushed we increasingly struggle to define what intelligence actually is. It becomes more useful to test what models cannot do instead of what they can. Random tasks like the pelican test can show how general the intelligence really is, putting aside the obvious flaw that the labs can optimise for such a simple public benchmark.
The whole point of this benchmark is that it asks the model to work in a modality it is not trained in and does not understand well. The result is largely meaningless. This is just like the people who are endlessly surprised by the fact that a raw LLM does not work with numbers well, or miscounts letters. In short, this test benchmarks the intelligence of the person running it, not of the model.
The rasterised SVG is just a different representation of the same data. A sufficiently advanced LLM may not need to 'see' the rasterised image to be able to draw a good picture. A human could draw a very basic image through raw SVG just by mentally plotting points.
Fun is so un-productive. Everyone doing things for "fun" is going to be sorry when they look back and realizes they were wasting time having a "good time" rather than optimizing their KPIs.
Going to have to disagree on the backup test. Opus flamingo is actually on the pedals and seat with functional spokes and beak. In terms of adherence to physical reality Qwen is completely off. To me it's a little puzzling that someone would prefer the Qwen output.
I'd say the example actually does (vaguely) suggest that Qwen might be overfitting to the Pelican.
Qwen's flamingo is artistically far more interesting. It's a one-eyed flamingo with sunglasses and a bow tie who smokes pot. Meanwhile Opus just made a boring, somewhat dorky flamingo. Even the ground and sky are more interesting in Qwen's version
But in terms of making something physically plausible, Opus certainly got a lot closer
Given adherence is a more significant practical barrier, it's probably the better signal. That is, if we decide too look for signal here.
The fundamental challenge of AI is preventing unprompted creativity. I can spin up a random initialization and call all of it's output avante garde if we want to get creative.
I recently fell down the rabbithole of AI-generated videos, and realised that many of the "flaws" that make them distinctive, such as objects morphing and doing unusual things, would've been nearly impossible or require very advanced CGI to create.
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"artistically interesting" is IMHO both a subjective and 'solved' problem. These models are trained with an "artistically interesting" reward model that tries to guide the model towards higher quality photos.
I think getting the models to generate realistic and proportional objects is a much harder and important challenge (remember when the models would generate 6 fingers?).
The Opus bike isn't very physically plausible though.
Qwen, at least, can draw a complete bicycle frame. The opus frame will snap in half and can’t steer.
Qwen's frame is so strong that it broke both feet off the pelican.
Clearly he's riding a fixie and trying to stop. Pelican didn't drink his Ovaltine.
Even the first one - Qwen added extra details in the background sure. But he Pelican itself is a stork with a bent beak and it's feet is cut off it's legs. While impressive for a local model, I don't think it's a winner.
Did you see opus bike though for that same test? I know it is about the flamingo but that is bad.
It's a 3B model. It should not be this close. Debating their artistic qualities is missing the point.
35B, but your point stands I think.
For coding, qwen 3.6 35b a3b solved 11/98 of the Power Ranking tasks (best-of-two), compared to 10/98 for the same size qwen 3.5. So it's at best very slightly improved and not at all in the class of qwen 3.5 27b dense (26 solved) let alone opus (95/98 solved, for 4.6).
This has similar problems to swe bench in that models are likely trained on the same open source projects that the benchmark uses.
https://blog.brokk.ai/introducing-the-brokk-power-ranking/
If all models are trained on the benchmark data, you cannot extrapolate the benchmark scores to performance on unseen data, but the ranking of different models still tells you something. A model that solves 95/98 benchmark problems may turn out much worse than that in real life, but probably not much worse than the one that only solved 11/98 despite training on the benchmark problems.
This doesn't hold if some models trained on the benchmark and some didn't, but you can fix this by deliberately fine-tuning all models for the benchmark before comparing them. For more in-depth discussion of this, see https://mlbenchmarks.org/11-evaluating-language-models.html#...
It is much faster though. On my m1 max, describing a picture (quick way to get a pretty large context):
Qwen 3.6 35b a3b: 34 tok/sec
Qwen 3.5 27b: 10 tok/sec
Qwen 3.5 35b a3b: doesn't support image input
I've been using Qwen 3.5 35B-A3B with images as input so I suspect you perhaps didn't include the vision part of the model during testing (I use llama.cpp and I learned I needed to include the separate mmproj part).
What is the quantization level of your Owen 3.6 3b model?
You compare tiny modal for local inference vs propertiary, expensive frontier model. It would be more fair to compare against similar priced model or tiny frontier models like haiku, flash or gpt nano.
Not when the article they're commenting on was doing literally exactly the same thing.
Eh it’s important perspective, lest someone start thinking they can drop $5k on a laptop and be free of Anthropic/OpenAI. Expensive lesson.
I understand the 'fun factor' but at this point I really wonder what this pelican still proofs ? I mean, providers certainly could have adapted for it if they wanted, and if you want to test how well a model adapts to potential out of distribution contexts, it might be more worthwhile to mix different animals with different activity types (a whale on a skateboard) than always the same.
That's why I did the flamingo on a unicycle.
For a delightful moment this morning I thought I might have finally caught a model provider cheating by training for the pelican, but the flamingo convinced me that wasn't the case.
It is completely wild to me that you prefer Qwen's flamingo. I think it's really bad and Opus' is pretty good.
The Opus one doesn't even have a bowtie.
The Opus one looks like a flamingo, and looks like it's riding the unicycle. Sitting on the seat. Feet on the pedals.
The Qwen one looks like a 3-tailed, broken-winged, beakless (I guess? Is that offset white thing a beak? Or is it chewing on a pelican feather like it's a piece of straw?) monstrosity not sitting on the seat, with its one foot off the pedal (the other chopped off at the knee) of a malmanufactured wheel that has bonus spokes that are longer than the wheel.
But yeah, it does have a bowtie and sunglasses that you didn't ask for! Plus it says "<3 Flamingo on a Unicycle <3", which perhaps resolves all ambiguity.
Let's not oversell Opus' output. The Qwen flamingo is flawed but could be easily fixed with 1-2 prompts if you're really upset with it. The Opus SVG is not any better than something that I could make in Inkscape with 3 minutes and sufficient motivation. Calling Opus' flamingo "programmer art" would be an insult to programmers.
Game over opus
r/LocalLlama is now doing a horse in a racing car:
https://redd.it/1slz38i
To me the opus flamingo is waaaay better than the qwen one. qwen has the better pelican, though.
Is a flamingo on a unicycle not merely a special case of a pelican on a bicycle?
If I (commercially) made models I’d put specific care into producing SVGs of various animals doing (riding) various things ... I find it interesting how confident you seem to be that they’re not.
Google Gemini featured a bunch of examples of exactly that in their release video for 3.1 Pro: https://x.com/JeffDean/status/2024525132266688757
This is a gag that's long outlived its humor, but we're in a space so driven by hype there are people who will unironically take some signal from it. They'll swear up and down they know it's for fun, but let a great pelican come out and see if they don't wave it as proof the model is great alongside their carwash test.
Consider reading the article, which addresses all of the points you raise.
It's directly stated in the post that the entire test is meant to be humorous, not taken seriously, only that is has vaguely followed model performance to date. The author also writes that this new result shows that trend has broken..
Yeah I can imagine these popular benchmarks get special treatment in the training of new models. I wonder how they would perform for "Elephant riding a car" or "Lion sleeping in a bed"
They're certainly aware of the test, but a turtle doing a kickflip on a skateboard? I seriously doubt they train their models for that.
https://x.com/JeffDean/status/2024525132266688757
If anything, the disastrous Opus4.7 pelican shows us they don't pelicanmaxx
I think I found the leaked Claude Mythos version of the turtle benchmark: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l82XWTKLZuk
Such a disconnect from the minutes I’ve lost and given up on Gemini trying to get it to update a diagram in a slide today. The one shot joke stuff is great but trying to say “that is close but just make this small change” seems impossible. It’s the gap between toy and tool.
I swear every single time someone says "my laptop" on hacker news, it's some insane MacBook that is more powerful than 98% computers out there
I'm an iguana and need to wash my bicycle in the carwash. Shall I walk or take the bus?
You should have the pelican ride it to the carwash and wash it for you.
That’s a long walk! You should reserve a ride with $PartnerRideshareCo.
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You can just straight up ask Opus if it's good at generating images and it will say no. It has never been marketed as being for image generation.
Claude is actually very good at SVGs, and it's genuinely useful. I have Claude knock out little SVG icons all the time.
Illustrations with SVGs of pelicans riding bicycles will never be useful, because pelicans can't ride bicycles.
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More and more I suspect OpenAI is generating comments on HN to try shift the discussion.
I’m not sure you’re a bot but this is the stereotypical comment being overly critical of anything where OpenAI is not superior or being overly supportive (see comments on the Codex post today) while clearly not understanding the discussed topic at all.
His account is from 2016.
This is not refutation of astroturfing on HN, but in this case, I doubt it.
That's not surprising; Opus & Sonnet have been regressing on many non-coding tasks since about the 4.1 release in our testing
I don't know what such a demo would prove in the first place. LLMs are good at things that they have been trained on, or are analogues of things they have been trained on. SVG generation isn't really an analogue to any task that we usually call on LLMs to do. Early models were bad at it because their training only had poor examples of it. At a certain point model companies decided it would be good PR to be halfway decent at generating SVGs, added a bunch of examples to the finetuning, and voila. They still aren't good enough to be useful for anything, and such improvements don't lead them to be good at anything else - likely the opposite - but it makes for cute demos.
I guess initially it would have been a silly way to demonstrate the effect of model size. But the size of the largest models stopped increasing a while ago, recent improvements are driven principally by optimizing for specific tasks. If you had some secret task that you knew they weren't training for then you could use that as a benchmark for how much the models are improving versus overfitting for their training set, but this is not that.
Comparing the SVGs I got for GPT-5.4, -mini and -nano at the different thinking levels was surprisingly interesting: https://simonwillison.net/2026/Mar/17/mini-and-nano/ (bottom of post)
On thinking about the reasons this may be something at least slightly more than training on the task is the richness with which language is filled with spatial metaphors even in basic language not by laymen considered metaphor outside the field of linguistics proper, in which concepts eg Lakoff's analysis in "Metaphors we Live By and others are simply part of the field, (though unsurprisingly, among the HN crowd I've occasionally seen it brought up)
The amount of money you have in the bank may often "increase" or "decrease" but it also goes up and down, spatial. Concepts can be adjacent to each, orthogonal. Plenty more.
So, as models utilize weight more densely with more complex strategies learned during training the patterns & structure of these metaphors might also be deepened. Hmmm... another thing to add to the heap of future project-- trace down the geometry of activations in older/newer models of similar size with the same prompts containing such metaphors, or these pelican prompts, test the idea so it isn't just arm chair speculation.
> I’m giving this one to Qwen too, partly for the excellent <!-- Sunglasses on flamingo! --> SVG comment
You say you like the one from Qwen better and the only reason you give has nothing to do with the task.
In general, one should provide specific expectations regarding the properties of the image before the experiment. One important property should be "does not hallucinate stuff into the image that are unrelated to the prompt".
Maybe the next time we suspect they're optimising for the test, switch the next test to drawing "the cure for cancer".
I've been using Qwen3.5-35B-A3B for a bit via open code and oMLX on M5 Max with 128Gb of RAM and I have to say it's impressively good for a model of that size. I've seen a huge jump in the quality of the tool calls and how well it handles the agentic workflow.
This is about the newly release Qwen3.6. Just wanted to make sure you got that correctly.
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I'm really curious about what competes with Claude Code to drive a local LLM like Qwen 3.6?
OpenCode or Pi are popular agent harnesses. Lots of IDEs integrate LLMs now. I believe there’s also a Qwen Code that exists, but I have yet to try it.
OpenCode?
I'm currently testing Qwen3.6-35B-A3B with https://swival.dev for security reviews.
It's pretty good at finding bugs, but not so good at writing patches to fix them.
This is a useless benchmark now a days, every model provider trains their models on making good pelicans. Some have even trained every combination of animal/mode of transportation
Every model provider except OpenAI?
That Qwen flamingo on the unicycle is actually quite good. A work of art.
Wonder what would happen if we unleashed Karpathy’s autoresearch on the pelican bicycle test. And had it read back the image to judge it.
Oh maybe it might continue to iterate on the existing drawing?
I liked both of Opus' better, it was very illuminating, in both cases I didn't see the error's Simon saw and wondered why Simon skipped over the errors I saw.
Pelican: saturated!
I really wish they spent some time training for computer use. This model is incapable of finding anywhere near the correct x,y coordinate of a simple object in a picture.
How much ram on the MacBook.
God bless these open models. Claude can’t subsidize its users forever and no one can afford 1200$ a month for llm credits.
> no one can afford 1200$ a month for llm credits.
you'd be surprised....
A Blackwell pro is only 10k.
Will Claude constantly be able to deliver more value than rolling your own ?
I think the future is a bunch of just good enough models, which is what most people need. Not top of the line models that require millions in hardware to run
not that I disagree with you in principle but I see this the same was a "cloud" - 10's of thousands of companies could save gazillion dollars by hosting their infrastructure and yet they continue to pay insane amounts of moneys to AWSs and Azures and whatnots. While some company's future may as well be running local models I would venture a guess that vast majority will just eat the costs and pass on as much of it as they can to their customers...
Hmm, can we agree open models place a sort of price ceiling on what most companies will pay.
Eventually another cloud provider can just spin up a few llms vs paying whatever Claude demands
FYI, using a 128GB M5 MacBook Pro, sourced from another article by the author.
Between the legs and the beak I'd still rate the opus pelican higher
LLM's really causing serious brainrot if html pelican drawings are a usage basis for your programming projects, even all these shitty benchmarks don't say or mean anything if companies secretly tweak them on the go
Most of the 'coding benchmarks' are deeply flawed too. This one at least makes it explicit
And so far, the ability to make SVGs of $animal on $ vehicle seems to correlate surprisingly well with model 'intelligence'
All those models that were just at version 1.x in 2024
That’s so wild
why is that flammingo in Qwen smoking?
I love this benchmark!
looks like opus have been nerfed from day1
Good reminder that these tests have always been useless, even before they started training on it.
How about switching to MechaStalin on a tricycle? It gets kind of boring.
boring ... the ways all the models fail at a simple task never gets boring to me
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If they're testing against it why do most of their attempts suck so much?
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I literally cannot believe that people are wasting their time doing this either as a benchmark or for fun. After every single language model release, no less.
It feels like the results stopped being interesting a little while ago but the practice has become part of simonw's brand, and it gives him something to post even when there is nothing interesting to say about another incremental improvement to a model, and so I don't imagine he'll stop.
I, for one, expected progress. Uneven, sometimes delayed, but ever increasing progress.
But that Opus pelican?
It’s not a waste of time. As the boundaries of AI are pushed we increasingly struggle to define what intelligence actually is. It becomes more useful to test what models cannot do instead of what they can. Random tasks like the pelican test can show how general the intelligence really is, putting aside the obvious flaw that the labs can optimise for such a simple public benchmark.
The whole point of this benchmark is that it asks the model to work in a modality it is not trained in and does not understand well. The result is largely meaningless. This is just like the people who are endlessly surprised by the fact that a raw LLM does not work with numbers well, or miscounts letters. In short, this test benchmarks the intelligence of the person running it, not of the model.
The rasterised SVG is just a different representation of the same data. A sufficiently advanced LLM may not need to 'see' the rasterised image to be able to draw a good picture. A human could draw a very basic image through raw SVG just by mentally plotting points.
Fun is so un-productive. Everyone doing things for "fun" is going to be sorry when they look back and realizes they were wasting time having a "good time" rather than optimizing their KPIs.
Sarcasm aside, asking LLMs do draw pelicans is your idea of fun? I'm worried for you.
No. I've never done it. However the stuff I do is even weirder. Thanks for your concern.
That's what happens in a monopoly enviornment. Literally everyone and every company becomes dancing monkeys for teracaps
I can't believe you're such a party pooper. It's exciting times, the silly things do matter!
I do wonder how much energy collectively has been burned on this useless "benchmark".
I also can't understand how this goes so viral every time on Hackernews lol