alt Hacker NewsI'm beginning to wonder how much of a useful metric the pelican is because surely the frontier labs must be training their models on pelican-artistry because of how well known your test is now?
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I just run my own benchmark for "draw an SVG with $animal driving $vehicle". I won't post my choice of animal and mode of transport, but there are plenty of uncommon combinations to choose from. So far it's a fun and visually intuitive benchmark that does seem to correlate with model capabilities
It's evolved from a funny, unserious benchmark to a tradition. When a major new model is released, I now always check the HN thread for Simon's Pelican post. I'll be sad when I don't find it.
When it started, comparing the progress between models was mildly interesting but everyone (including Simon) acknowledges it certainly leaked into the training data long ago.
I don't know. Just looking at the bike frames (specifically the fact that the AI generated bikes have rather unsteerable front forks), it's clear to me that frontier labs aren't spending much time tuning models to make bikes look coherent, which I assume is an easier task than making a pelican riding a bike look coherent.
The way I see it the benefit of benchmark isn't to take Simon's results at face value. It's a template for your own benchmarks that are easy to visually evaluate.
I've seen this reply to Simon's benchmark for 2 years running now, and yet you still see improvements and objectively-bad results over time from new releases, even when I'm sure every frontier AI team has/had a person at least partially dedicated to better bicycle-pelican SVG outputs. Alas.
It was a completely useless test even before the labs trained for it.
Simon has addressed this on virtually every new model release. He also has unpublished alternate prompts. But the larger point is: this is a fun experiment, not a serious and objective benchmark.