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stusmalltoday at 6:50 PM2 repliesview on HN

I'm glad someone ran the numbers on this. Every single Simon Willison post of an SVG is followed with someone dismissing it saying "I'm sure they train on it by now." This is despite a good blog post with sound logic on how easy that is to catch. [1] Glad to see someone took the time for a quantitative analysis of dumb little animals riding dumb little bikes.

1. https://simonwillison.net/2025/Nov/13/training-for-pelicans-...


Replies

unholinesstoday at 7:49 PM

I don't think this small amount generalization to other animals and vehicles is strong evidence they haven't trained on this, either directly or more generally.

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elicashtoday at 8:32 PM

There's that version of the argument version, but there's also the softer version: that there used to be no training material of illustrated pelicans on bicycles, but now you have actual artistically talented individuals drawing it and that could improve the performance even though the AI labs are sucking it up no differently than everything else.

This post proves that hasn't happened yet, either. Although maybe the bad results posted online are being trained on and that explains the UNDER performance.