alt Hacker NewsThe 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!
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Simon - has no one told you about the Willison-Pelican Scaling Law?
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if is_willison_pelican_blog_post:
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You haven't seen their final form [1]
[1] final form is a frontend/react/let's not talk about it, library - it caused a great deal of PTSD to me and my previous company's team due to its dogmatic preference for "we use these axioms, end of story", over practical utility - so it was quite challenging to do state of the art tasks such as nested form fields (e.g. 'user.address.personal.line-1'). The PTSD it caused made us all block out the memories, I suppose. But - it had zero dependencies. That is what mattered. It kept us going. We weren't reaching for more. We had plenty of time.
And thank god for that. Because I'd forgotten my watch in California - and this was in Tokyo [2]
[2] a joke within a joke about Jensen's Kyoto gardener story. Beautiful story, drowned out by WatchGate memes. Why can't jokes have layers? Models have trillions. If you miss 100% of the jokes you don't make, make all the jokes. Someone will laugh (eventually, maybe?) Even if it's: "this person + comedy club = full secret service detail". If someone laughs at that - at my own expense? I don't mind. They laughed. I know this is a gibberish, off-topic message - it's also a human message. I just felt we need more such things in our lives these days.
PS: have you physically seen a pelican in real life? (not a joke)
Yes, I see your point.
Your pelican output is thus both in the training set and yet still outside the capability of the model architecture.
And so you are tracking both the capability of the training and also the capability of the querying!
When you receive your first outstanding pelican it will track a gain of capability.
(btw I first mentioned simonw-pelican-into-training-set in May 2025 on twitter.)
My 3D-egyptology-explainer showed a massive uplift for Kimi K3 and this tracks a much improved 3D capability.
I agree with that. I think, in particular, all the broken bike frames associated with "pelican on a bike" probably make it harder for LLMs to render correct bike frames.
At this point I am simply interested in how much longer you're gonna ride this schtick
Respectfully, the pelicans used to be an unrecognisable mess and now they’re unquestionably pelicans on bicycles, rendered poorly, from every model.
In the same timescale, model capabilities across the board have only meaningfully improved in places where the labs are focusing their training efforts.
Moreover, they have a uniform style, even though your prompt doesn’t ask for one. There's no model going rogue and producing a watercolour of a pelican. They’re all rendered in an approximately uniform style, even though the svg format has a basically unlimited possibility space.