Kimi is right out since they use classical music branding to sell their slop. At least McDonalds does not sell Verdi or Allegro burgers.
Why does Kimi not use a "Double Cheese Whammy" branding for "their" butchered and stolen IP?
Kimi K3, and what we can still learn from the pelican benchmark
71–80 of 245 posts
Re: Kimi K3, and what we can still learn from the pelican benchmark
#72Don't see why we have to have this spammed every model release when Fable class models perform the same as Opus on basic tasks like these.
What spam? It’s one article. You can skip it
Re: Kimi K3, and what we can still learn from the pelican benchmark
#73I would be surprised if pelican svgs are not part of the training corpus rn
That’s covered in the article
Re: Kimi K3, and what we can still learn from the pelican benchmark
#74Re: Kimi K3, and what we can still learn from the pelican benchmark
#75It's incredible Simon still believes pelicans on bikes aren't part of the training set, despite hundreds of them on blogs, forums, and Github. Stuff we put in our company blog shows up known by LLMs 6 months later, and we have 1000x less traffic than Simon's own website
The pelicans are still all rubbish. If they make it into the training set it doesn't help the models produce better pelicans, if anything it will make them perform worse!
Respectfully, 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.
Re: Kimi K3, and what we can still learn from the pelican benchmark
#76One thing i keep thinking: you only run the pelican once per model. Run the same model a few times and you get some different pelicans, so some of "this one is better" might just be which run you picked for it. Would love to see 8 runs per model side by side. I bet for two close models, the gap between runs is about as big as the gap between the models.
Re: Kimi K3, and what we can still learn from the pelican benchmark
#77One thing i keep thinking: you only run the pelican once per model. Run the same model a few times and you get some different pelicans, so some of "this one is better" might just be which run you picked for it. Would love to see 8 runs per model side by side. I bet for two close models, the gap between runs is about as big as the gap between the models.
I've done versions in the past where I ran 3 and picked the best one. At some point I'd like to automate that with an LLM-as-a-judge (from the same model family) picking the "best" one to move forth in the competition.
I built a whole ELO scoring mechanism a while back, described here: https://simonwillison.net/2025/Jun/6/six-months-in-llms/#ai-...
I probably should spend some time on this now, even though the benchmark itself is feeling a bit stale. There's still a lot of demand for a gallery!
Re: Kimi K3, and what we can still learn from the pelican benchmark
#78It's incredible Simon still believes pelicans on bikes aren't part of the training set, despite hundreds of them on blogs, forums, and Github. Stuff we put in our company blog shows up known by LLMs 6 months later, and we have 1000x less traffic than Simon's own website
Yeah I asked Nano Banana to make a render of our company office and was scarily accurate
Re: Kimi K3, and what we can still learn from the pelican benchmark
#79Do any of the vision models render the SVG and look at the result. Perhaps more importantly can they do that during reinforcement training. Learning how to critically analyse the appearance of what it generates would be quite useful. Manually feeding images back to models has been hilariously bad in the past which suggests that relating something it sees to something it wrote is not an ability it is very good at.
I've tried doing a loop of rending the SVG and then tweaking based on that, with local models (so, not nearly as strong). It wasn't very successful; it would mostly report that the image looked great and didn't need any tweaks. Maybe I should try it again, there have been some newer models since I first tried it. And yeah, maybe worth trying with bigger models. But I have found that models aren't necessarily the best at visual reasoning and review, even with a vision loop. Their lack of visual reasoning is part of why they still have trouble with things like ARC-AGI-3.
Re: Kimi K3, and what we can still learn from the pelican benchmark
#80Earlier quoted context omitted.
The pelicans are still all rubbish. If they make it into the training set it doesn't help the models produce better pelicans, if anything it will make them perform worse!
Respectfully, 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 pro…
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.