Yes, the curve of the front fork on the max pelican was what I noticed also. It's impressive (if not an accident), and a remarkably accurate bike overall. The pelican just needs to raise their seat a little.

Here's 'Generate an SVG of a ring-tailed lemur riding an electric scooter' at reasoning level max: https://tools.simonwillison.net/markdown-svg-renderer?url=ht...

Quote from the thinking trace:

> I’m thinking about how a helmet would obscure lemur ears, but using an electric scooter helmet seems responsible.

It's pretty solid - face is a little wonky but excellent tail and scooter.

I would expect it happens more organically where people’s discussion of the benchmark and posted results find their way into the training data, like anything else on the internet.

There was a HN post that tested this hypothesis a few weeks ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49010129

What is this supposed to mean exactly? Do you think there are developers at OpenAI or Anthropic whose job is to train these state of the art models to draw pelicans riding bicycles? Like how exactly do you expect them to be doing that anyways? Hiring graphic artists to create SVGs of bike riding pelicans and feeding thousands of them into the model's training set?

It stopped being a valuable benchmark proxy quite a few model versions ago. Simon knows it, so is everyone who’s serious about it

Treat it like a bit as is

For the moment the best place to see them all is to browse the tag on my blog - 140 posts now! https://simonwillison.net/tags/pelican-riding-a-bicycle/

I'm running out of excuses not to build a proper comparison site though. Maybe I'll have Astra do rhat.

This tracks with what OpenAI has been saying about Astra: that it tends to do things in a certain way and it’s up to you to prompt it to change its style.

Astra is the only model that correctly depicts occlusion of crank and leg, although interestingly, at max and medium levels (not in between).

Haiku the GOAT

I have a feeling they've been doing that for a while now, even if unintentional, as it's such a well known benchmark

But pelicans are almost never accompanied by helmets, so it cancels out.

> Biking is almost always accompanied by helmets

Isnt Netherlands the leader in bike riders and they dont wear helmets.

At least one reasoning trace I saw considered a helmet and discarded the idea because it was worried about obscuring some detail

The price is probably coming from when Luna was first released. OpenAI slashed the price by 80% at the end of July.

Me toooo, for all my personal projects I need to pay for the tokens~ At workplace I use sol because I don't need to pay

Mine as well, it’s fast and keeps me in flow; and cheap!

How are we supposed to know if Astra is frontier without the pelican?

It's simonw. It's interesting to see their pelican benchmark, another comment by a different author elsewhere here shows some very good SVG generation too.

It's absolutely related.