alt Hacker NewsRespectfully, the pelicans used to be an unrecognisable mess and now they’re unquestionably pelicans on bicycles, rendered poorly, from every model.
In the same timescale, model capabilities across the board have only meaningfully improved in places where the labs are focusing their training efforts.
Moreover, they have a uniform style, even though your prompt doesn’t ask for one. There's no model going rogue and producing a watercolour of a pelican. They’re all rendered in an approximately uniform style, even though the svg format has a basically unlimited possibility space.
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> the pelicans used to be an unrecognisable mess and now they’re unquestionably pelicans on bicycles, rendered poorly, from every model
You would not expect that to happen if the models trained on the unrecognizable mess, right?
> model capabilities across the board have only meaningfully improved in places where the labs are focusing their training efforts
And the labs clearly did focus on improving image rendering.
> they have a uniform style
SVG output from LLMs always looks like that. It looked that way from the beginning; no LLM ever produced a watercolor when asked for SVG output. They all render the prompted element centered in the picture. They all tend to draw things going from left to right, and so on.
If you’ve been keeping track of all of the pelicans, there is actually stylistic differences - sometimes pretty big differences as far as watercolors go. It’s an SVG so I’m not sure what you’re looking for there. Most look the same because the prompt is to make a pelican on a bicycle as an SVG. It’s not some giant image prompt.
> model capabilities across the board have only meaningfully improved in places where the labs are focusing their training efforts
That doesn't seem right. I use these models as research assistants when writing lots of random blog posts (including in economically ~useless areas like the history of contra dance) and Fable 5 is a serious improvement (when I don't get downgraded!) over Opus 4.6-4.8 which was a serious improvement over Opus 4.
being able to draw a picture of a pelican is really cool and it requires intelligence but i don't think it's a good measure of improving capabilities of these models nor AGI. we don't have to spend so much breath on it.
You know what, that's actually something I hadn't considered before. There's definitely a bias towards a pelican cycling from left to right on a red bicycle against a blue sky and green grass.
Blue sky and green grass aren't that surprising, but the color and direction are interesting.
When I finally build the proper gallery I'll throw in a few other creature-vehicle combinations, and track some characteristics like which direction, color of bicycle, general pelican geometry etc. It will be interesting to see if other creatures end up with coincidentally similar design choices or if that's unique to the pelican-bicycle combination.