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simonwtoday at 4:35 AM14 repliesview on HN

I like the pelican I got out of deepseek-v4-flash more than the one I got from deepseek-v4-pro.

https://simonwillison.net/2026/Apr/24/deepseek-v4/

Both generated using OpenRouter.

For comparison, here's what I got from DeepSeek 3.2 back in December: https://simonwillison.net/2025/Dec/1/deepseek-v32/

And DeepSeek 3.1 in August: https://simonwillison.net/2025/Aug/22/deepseek-31/

And DeepSeek v3-0324 in March last year: https://simonwillison.net/2025/Mar/24/deepseek/


Replies

JSR_FDEDtoday at 4:37 AM

No way. The Pro pelican is fatter, has a customized front fork, and the sun is shining! He’s definitely living the best life.

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torginustoday at 6:26 AM

This is just a random thought, but have you tried doing an 'agentic' pelican?

As in have the model consider its generated SVG, and gradually refine it, using its knowledge of the relative positions and proportions of the shapes generated, and have it spin for a while, and hopefully the end result will be better than just oneshotting it.

Or maybe going even one step further - most modern models have tool use and image recognition capabilities - what if you have it generate an SVG (or parts/layers of it, as per the model's discretion) and feed it back to itself via image recognition, and then improve on the result.

I think it'd be interesting to see, as for a lot of models, their oneshot capability in coding is not necessarily corellated with their in-harness ability, the latter which really matters.

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nickvectoday at 4:40 AM

The Flash one is pretty impressive. Might be my favorite so far in the pelican-riding-a-bicycle series

murkttoday at 5:31 AM

DeepSeek pelicans are the angriest pelicans I’ve seen so far.

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mikae1today at 5:17 AM

Being a bicycle geometry nerd I always look at the bicycle first.

Let me tell you how much the Pro one sucks... It looks like failed Pedersen[1]. The rear wheel intersects with the bottom bracket, so it wouldn't even roll. Or rather, this bike couldn't exist.

The flash one looks surprisingly correct with some wild fork offset and the slackest of seat tubes. It's got some lowrider[2] aspirations with the small wheels, but with longer, Rivendellish[3], chainstays. The seat post has different angle than the seat tube, so good luck lowering that.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pedersen_bicycle

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lowrider_bicycle

[3] https://www.rivbike.com/

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catelmtoday at 5:33 AM

I think the pelican on a bike is known widely enough that of seizes to be useful as a benchmark. There is even a pelican briefly appearing in the promo video of GPT-5, if I'm not mistaken https://openai.com/gpt-5/. So the companies are apparently aware of it.

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brutal_chaos_today at 5:36 AM

What was your prompt for the image? Apologies if this should be obvious.

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nsoonhuitoday at 5:49 AM

To me this is the perfect proof that

1) LLM is not AGI. Because surely if AGI it would imply that pro would do better than flash?

2) and because of the above, Pelican example is most likely already being benchmaxxed.

chvidtoday at 5:51 AM

Is it then Deepseek hosted by Deepseek?

How much does the drawing change if you ask it again?

ycui1986today at 4:46 AM

I really like the pro version. The pelican is so cute.

theanonymousonetoday at 5:30 AM

Where is the GPT 5.5 Pelican?

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lobochrometoday at 5:30 AM

Why they so angry?

whateveraccttoday at 5:07 AM

[flagged]

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EnPissanttoday at 5:47 AM

This should not be the top comment on every model release post. It's getting tiring.

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