alt Hacker NewsMe in 2025 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44759781
> If it's on HN and is a meme at this point, it will end up in the training set.
> It's kind of fun to imagine that there is an intern in every AI company furiously trying to get nice looking svg pelicans on bicycles.
Google listened and assigned a few interns, I guess, for the task
Replies
SVG is useful for actual tasks, not just looking good in a silly "benchmark"
We all said it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46978726 (8 months ago)
> How many pelican riding bicycle SVGs were there before this test existed? What if the training data is being polluted with all these wonky results...
But Simon has demonstrated before that asking for any animal doing something silly will still get similar results from the same model.
It's still clearly not a part of any model's training set in the sense of pelicanmaxxing in particular. It's either a capability to generate arbitrary SVGs (or even something broader), or no specific training at all.
Certainly true but I think the question is “does targeting the SVG pelican mean that the quality of all SVG output improves?” If so it’s a worthwhile thing to target.
Sadly, this is all that managers know to do: take a metric and try to optimize the heck out of it. They don't care about research, technology, "don't be evil", etc. And Google is run by managers now.
Expect Google models to be benchmaxxed as much as possible, but don't expect commensurate performance on real-world tasks.
For sure, they saw your comment and got some interns on it.
They said they are training for svg not pelican svg specifically
Maybe so, and yet it's still not enough -- the pelicans all have flaws.
They look remarkably good, sure -- but not perfect.
I end up getting SVG output for all kinds of things, and never once have I asked for, or gotten, a pelican.
That's exactly what I was thinking when I saw https://www.assbench.com/ posted a while back: "oh no, this is going to be somebody's job".