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▲ simonw 3 hours ago

Pelicans for thinking levels low, medium, high, and xhigh:

https://tools.simonwillison.net/markdown-svg-renderer?url=ht...

max is in there too, but it ran out of reasoning tokens (128,000 limit) before it got to the actual SVG.

▲thefourthchime 15 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

Scored only a 77/100 in PacBench, which I thought must have been a mistake.

https://jonclegg.github.io/pacman-bakeoff/#claude-fable-5-2

Then I clicked on it and realized it refused to make a Pac-Man game, and instead made up a new game. That's actually very slick.

▲theraven 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Before everyone jumps in the benchmaxxing comments, I genuinely find the pelicans a great bit of fun and whimsy amongst the chaos.

Interesting how low detail these were all up until xhigh.

▲Kotlopou 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

I don't know, for me they lost the fun and whimsy aspect too, a long time ago. They have converged on more-or-less the same design (facing right, pastel color palette, etc.). Some of the lower-effort ones are a bit goofy at least, but now even that is being polished away.

▲tetraodonpuffer 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

low detail but even high had the legs correctly one behind and one in front of the frame, don't remember other models getting it correctly at this low level of effort

▲usaar333 2 hours ago | parent [-]

There's no legs on low and medium.

High gets legs correctly, but screws up the layering on the chain.

x-high is very good but there are minor laying error with the front chainring.

▲nxtfari an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I haven’t read any of the other model reasoning traces, but do many others now say “… which is a well known test of drawing ability” when beginning? Noticed it in the max reasoning trace.

▲simonw an hour ago | parent [-]

I saw that in Haiku 5.5 as well: https://simonwillison.net/2026/Oct/7/claude-haiku-5-5/#pelic... - "This is the classic pelican-on-bicycle SVG test..."

▲jansan 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I added a second iteration with the simple prompt

"Make it more realistic"

Well, the result is something. Be aware that it took 20 minutes and used 3 percent of my weekly Fable token (Ultra plan):

https://claude.ai/public/artifacts/c7e842c0-bf92-41af-82c6-3...

▲simonw an hour ago | parent [-]

Hah, that's pretty great.

▲theraven 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Simon has there been other times where the front and rear wheels have been offset in rotation? The xhigh effort one is the first I’ve noticed of this

▲pianopatrick 21 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-]

So the AI can overthink too

▲LarsDu88 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

The fidelity of these pelicans is going to be based on whether the frontierlab has an RL setup specifically for making SVG images, lol

I know the latest Gemini release explicitly had something like this.

▲piker 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Seems like the higher levels just add more spontaneous detail. Like the "fingers" on xhigh. Comports with coding experience.

▲BrokenCogs 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

In practice why would anyone use fable low?

▲Huppie an hour ago | parent [-]

I haven't done any benchmarking of it yet but AA has it more intelligent, cheaper, and faster than Opus 5.5 high.

My experience working with Opus medium over Sonnet xhigh is similar, it's similar quality but cheaper and faster.

I hate to make a comparison with humans but I guess my view is you can get a better answer more quickly by asking a more intelligent human too.

▲jansan 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

It's a bit underwhelming, to be honest. And the fact that curves are not C-continuous where they obviously should be is disappointing. I think they are holding back with the real capability they could implement.