I am growing tired of these pelicans posts every time a new model is published. Feels to me like low effort personal brand promotion. Just sharing my 2 cents.
+1. First thing I look for in a model announcement thread. I actually came across this one an hour ago and was sad there were no pelicans yet.
It's a decent heuristic because the better models generate better pelicans. That's all. Nobody sane is going to make a bet on a model based on a pelican. But it's cool, it's tradition by now, and it's a semblance of a good first impression for new models.
Thank you for posting them (as well as all your other AI takes). It's appreciated here!
I feel like the human brain massively overweights negative feedback over positive, and that's even after accounting for the fact that internet discourse tends to mostly surface negative comments (whereas the enjoyers stay silent). By default I have to try hard not to take it personally whenever someone leaves a negative comment about my work.
So just doing my bit to say I appreciate your commentary on so much of the fast-evolving AI landscape. Helps me orient :)
At this point, it's kind of a hackernews thing. Simon posts them as a single comment in the relevant thread. It's okay for this place to have a little bit of a sense of community, and you can just ignore the comment.
But how else am I supposed to know when we've reached AGI, until I see an absolutely flawless pelican?
All of the pelicans so far have had really weird flaws / quirks so I am always a little interested to see how well these models perform at this task, since I've seen all the past pelicans and have some anchoring.
Seeing a truly flawless pelican would tell me that the model has true visual reasoning capabilities as well as good taste.
I agree to rednb that at this point it feels like rather obvious brand building, but also, I agree with you that some value is in it.
It does not feel all that authentic though, and it's good to react allergically to lack of authenticity. Bad for a lot of business models, but good for humanity.
Sorry mate, but you sound jealous in all these replies that the Pelican domain isn't your gig. The below is as labored as nitpicks ever get:
> It does not feel all that authentic though, and it's good to react allergically to lack of authenticity. Bad for a lot of business models, but good for humanity.
I thought the Gemini 3.5 Flash Lite response was quite telling myself. I personally like the Pelican SVG test, to me it is still a charming snapshot of model performance anecdata. No one would argue it's rigorous but I don't think it was ever intended to be.
I get people burning out on the pelican SVG test alongside the rest of the AI burnout, but I guess for myself I'm just choosing to keep enjoying it while I still can.
Not only does it give you a super easy-to-grok understanding of the model quality just by looking at the image, but when you compare tokens and costs (both input and output), you really get a good, simple COST x QUALITY evaluation across models.
Disagree. They're a nice tradition, but besides that, they're a useful way of eyeballing improvements. I realise labs are likely to be training for Pelicans - but if they're all training for them, the differences in the results are as indicative as they were before labs trained for them.
The 3.6 Flash pelican is just about the best I've seen.
Here is a different opinion. I’m always looking forward to see the pelican whenever a new model is released. It’s plain simple to understand, memorable, subtle enough in terms of details, and my favorite part is that you have been doing them consistently long enough for it to be useful for comparing almost everything with anything.
Your comment reads very pedantic with a hint of jealousy. The pelican and xbox controllers are great ways to see how well it can follow direction dealing with svg a difficult format for LLMs to use and testing their spatial vision awareness.
Yeah. It's something I can do myself in a couple seconds if I want, also on more varied SVG scenes. If this is going to be a benchmark people turn to I'd like to see more effort put into it than just a one-sentence prompt.
I'll split the difference. When it's a blog post there's usually an interesting observation or two, but if it's totally automated? Maybe just do the ones with a post.
They're easy enough to skip - click the little "-" icon and you'll collapse the entire sub-thread.