It's incredible Simon still believes pelicans on bikes aren't part of the training set, despite hundreds of them on blogs, forums, and Github. Stuff we put in our company blog shows up known by LLMs 6 months later, and we have 1000x less traffic than Simon's own website
Simon has stated a few times that he knows it’s possible that pelicans could be in the training sets. He also has other tests he doesn’t share publicly. He’s just a fan of pelicans.
Pelicans and bikes can be in the training set without them training for this specific benchmark.
More to it, the actual bloody companies are using them as a reference. Maybe it’s a 3d version, not an svg - but it clearly shows they’re on the radar of these companies.
Yeah I asked Nano Banana to make a render of our company office and was scarily accurate
It's incredible people still discuss the pelicans... But then again, the ad just works.
A person from Google famously put on her linkedin that her job was to optimize SVG for Gemini 3.0.
They can be in the training set but not deliberately trained for. There may be a lot of people posting pelican svgs, but not typically because they're high quality and worth replicating.
Did you read the post? It's not even that long. He explicitly mentions this...
Imagine if we applied this train of logic to humans.
"That artist saw a pelican at the beach once!" [cue the outrage] "He's not a real artist, he's a cheater and produces nothing original!"
The pelicans are still all rubbish. If they make it into the training set it doesn't help the models produce better pelicans, if anything it will make them perform worse!