(I can't draw a pelican for this one because Alibaba Cloud have flagged my email address and won't let me pay them for access. So I'm waiting for the open weights release, or for the new model to show up on OpenRouter.)
(I can't draw a pelican for this one because Alibaba Cloud have flagged my email address and won't let me pay them for access. So I'm waiting for the open weights release, or for the new model to show up on OpenRouter.)
Here's what qwen 3.8 max preview generated when prompted with "create an svg of a pelican riding a bicycle"
https://cypressf.com/qwen38-pelican.svg
Notably it added a cheeky fish in the beak.
What method did you use to generate that one?
I tried using their OpenAI-compatible API and got one that's a lot less fun (no animation) - https://tools.simonwillison.net/markdown-svg-renderer#url=ht...
I used the web UI at https://chat.qwen.ai/. I didn’t log in. I selected Qwen3.8-Max-Preview and prompted “create an SVG of a pelican riding a bicycle.”
It took a LOT of reasoning time before it spit it out. 10 min or more?
I wish I had created an account first because I lost the chain-of-thought that it used. I remember a couple highlights. There was an internal monologue about whether it was worth it to animate the legs and pedals, and a lot of repeated text about focusing on “a cohesive visual design.”
I don’t make svg art so I’m no expert, but I am also surprised at how small the resulting svg ended up. I expected LLM output to be more verbose, especially considering the animations.
I’m curious what happens if you retry a couple times. The nondeterminism might be strong enough to have highly variable outcomes.
Wow, that one is really good.
Apart from the fish being visible inside the pelican's mouth.
And it's animated!
lol the pelican benchmark is basically the only review process I trust at this point. kinda wild that alibaba of all companies is making it hard to give them money tho, you'd think they'd want prominent devs testing their stuff.
openrouter usually picks these up pretty fast, hopefully it shows up there soon. You can also just download the qwen app and do this in the chat interface using their MCP tools for local dev.
> kinda wild that alibaba of all companies is making it hard to give them money tho
Okay so this is entirely off topic but, are there any options to subscribe to these companies without having a credit card? (I am Brazilian if this makes a difference)
It's kind of wild that a Chinese AI lab will require something like.. a credit card with visa or mastercard label, and very little else.
It's an interesting example of the metric becoming a target. Simon started drawing pelicans because it wasn't something that existed before.
There’s a small albeit nonzero chance that frontier labs want Simon to stop using the pelican thing so they can draw attention to better benchmarks
As far as I can tell they all still understand that it's a joke.
I managed to get myself a working Qwen Cloud account, here's a pelican. The reasoning trace is pretty fun - three details I liked were "Could add helmet? No." and "Maybe add small bell? no." and "Need maybe add small fish in basket? Not necessary."
https://tools.simonwillison.net/markdown-svg-renderer#url=ht... (scroll to bottom for pelican)
AI rabble-rouser!
Did you know you can create more than one email address?
In my opinion, simonw shouldn't have to play those games
I find it so strange when someone comments something like this.
Nobody thinks this is okay or that Simon should have to play those games. The point of the reply was that while this is stupid, the solution is trivial.
I’m genuinely very curious what the point of comments like this is. I am not joking, I want to understand.
I see examples like it 50 times a week in random places, and nobody walks me through their mental state to help me understand what they thought the point was.
I'm not sure what the situation is here, but on many sites making alt account to avoid bans can result in a lifetime ban. A high profile figure who's been banned from a service advertising that they still have access to it might be a risk.
Also, these companies (or data brokers) likely share ban and alt account lists, ban evading could hurt the reputation of all your accounts.
These are some pragmatic reasons not to evade bans.
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Hackernews users are not immune to developing parasocial relationships with strangers on the internet.
The fawning that some users do over others because of their careers is really unbecoming.
I wish the kind of people who did this stuff would realize that there are only two possibilities here -- the person they're saying it to cringes a little bit time they hear it because they're a normal person or they smile a bit inside because they're mildly narcissistic and therefore not worthy of the incessant praise.
The best thing you can do for everyone involved is to treat people normally and not elevate people to celebrity status.
I wonder how a blackout on usernames for a day or so after they're posted would shape conversation here.
Uh, this is Hacker News. I thought people here didn’t give up so easily, even when they were "told" to. :)
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