alt Hacker News> But 'Drawing of a Proper Duck' is almost arbitrary because it may have nothing to do with the 'Specific Duck You Wanted'.
That might be the case, but Simon's case "Generate an SVG of a pelican riding a bicycle" is very different.
The model actually has to understand what parts of a pelican and bicycle come together in something like an anatomically plausible way. That's a higher level of abstraction than something like passing the same prompt to Stable Diffusion etc
(The new Nano Banana/GPT Image 2.0 models are different though - they have significant world knowledge baked in)
"That's a higher level of abstraction"
No, it's not because it's seen 'anatomy' for Pelicans, Animals - even how it's represented in Animals.
If you try to get the AI to actually decompose it and start to 'draw pelicans' in very obscure ways, it will immediately fail.
Try to get the AI to draw the pelican form a very odd angle - like underneath, to the right, one wing extended, one wing not ... 0% chance.
Precisely because it does not understand those things.
FYI it's a slightly unfair case because it does not have 'world model' yet, which will actually solve that problem, but even then not through very much abstracting.
We're a long way away - but in the meantime, there's lots to unpack.