The pelican prompt is ridiculous.
Test the LLLM against things you want it to do.
Asking questions that are absurd is like interviewing developers and asking absurd questions on the grounds that it tests creative and critical thinking.
Remember these Microsoft interview questions designed to identify the best developers?
"If you could eliminate one U.S. state, which one would it be?"
"How would you move Mount Fuji?"
Absurd interview questions have an air of legitimacy due to the quasi sophisticated justifications put forward for why they are good tests.
Absurd interview questions are not good tests of people or LLMs.
Relevant questions are good tests.
> Asking questions that are absurd is like interviewing developers and asking absurd questions on the grounds that it tests creative and critical thinking.
Yes; what's wrong with that?
Do you suppose that it doesn't test those qualities?
> The pelican prompt is ridiculous
Yes, deliberately so.
It was never intended as a meaningful benchmark. The surprising thing was that for the first ~12 months performance on the stupid pelican benchmark did seem to correspond to the performance of the models on other tasks.
That pattern no longer holds - Fable 5 and GPT-5.6 have both been out-pelicaned by lesser models now.
As I understand it; the point is to ask for an SVG which would demonstrate a conceptual understanding of what is being asked for and that is an important test IMO.
What sufficiently hard, but useful, problem would you ask the model for?
> Test the LLLM against things you want it to do
I agree, it is ridiculous to ask an LLM to replace an artist.
The whole point of "AI" is arbitrary task completion. Why isn't a SVG drawing relevant for that?