I've been running this on my laptop with the Unsloth 20.9GB GGUF in LM Studio: https://huggingface.co/unsloth/Qwen3.6-35B-A3B-GGUF/blob/mai...

It drew a better pelican riding a bicycle than Opus 4.7 did! https://simonwillison.net/2026/Apr/16/qwen-beats-opus/

I wonder when pelican riding a bicycle will be useless as an evaluation task. The point was that it was something weird nobody had ever really thought about before, not in the benchmarks or even something a team would run internally. But now I'd bet internally this is one of the new Shirley Cards.

I'm not sure how you can give the flamingo win to Qwen:

* It's sitting on the tire, not the seat.

* Is that weird white and black thing supposed to be a beak? If so, it's sticking out of the side of its face rather than the center.

* The wheel spokes are bizarre.

* One of the flamingo's legs doesn't extend to the pedal.

* If you look closely at the sunglasses, they're semi-transparent, and the flamingo only has one eye! Or the other eye is just on a different part of its face, which means the sunglasses aren't positioned correctly. Or the other eye isn't.

* (subjective) The sunglasses and bowtie are cute, but you didn't ask for them, so I'd actually dock points for that.

* (subjective) I guess flamingos have multiple tail feathers, but it looks kinda odd as drawn.

In contrast, Opus's flamingo isn't as detailed or fancy, but more or less all of it looks correct.

the more I look at these images the more convinced I become that world models are the major missing piece and that these really are ultimately just stochastic sentence machines. Maybe Chomsky was right

It's fascinating that a $999 Mac Mini (M4 32GB) with almost similar wattage as a human brain gets us this far.

I've been trying the Q4_K_M version, and sometimes it gets stuck in a loop. Gemma 4 doesn’t have this issue.

Hey I really enjoy your blog. On some things I end up finding a blog post of yours thats a year+ old and at other times, you and I are investigating similar things. I just pulled Qwen3.6 - 35b -A3B (Can't believe thats a A3B coming from 35b).

I'm impressed about the reach of your blog, and I'm hoping to get into blogging similar things. I currently have a lot on my backlog to blog about.

In short, keep up the good work with an interesting blog!

interesting, I just tried this very model, unsloth, Q8, so in theory more capable than Simon's Q4, and get those three "pelicans". definitely NOT opus quality. lmstudio, via Simon's llm, but not apple/mlx. Of course the same short prompt.

Simon, any ideas?

https://ibb.co/gFvwzf7M

https://ibb.co/dYHRC3y

https://ibb.co/FLc6kggm (tried here temperature 0.7 instead of pure defaults)

But that you also gave a win to Qwen on flamingo is pretty outrageous! :)

Tthe right one looks much better, plus adding sunglasses without prompting is not that great. Hopefully it won't add some backdoor to the generated code without asking. ;)

The flamingo on Qwen's unicycle is sitting on the tire, not the seat. That wins because of sunglasses?

Interesting, qwen has the pelican driving on the left lane. Coincidence or has it something to do with the workers providing the RL data?

I've had some really gnarly SVGs from Claude. Here's what I got after many iterations trying to draw a hand: https://imgur.com/a/X4Jqius

Oh that is pretty good! And the SVG one!

How does it do with the "car wash" benchmark? :D