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Gemini 3 Deep Think drew me a good SVG of a pelican riding a bicycle

simonwillison.net

11–20 of 63 posts

Re: Gemini 3 Deep Think drew me a good SVG of a pelican riding a bicycle

#11

The intensity of competition between models is so intense right now they are definitely benchmaxxing pelican on bike SVGs and Will Smith spaghetti dinner videos.

So, again, when the indicator becomes a target, it stops being a good indicator.

That's how you know you've made it: when your pet benchmark becomes a target.

Re: Gemini 3 Deep Think drew me a good SVG of a pelican riding a bicycle

#13

The intensity of competition between models is so intense right now they are definitely benchmaxxing pelican on bike SVGs and Will Smith spaghetti dinner videos.

note that this benchmark aside, they've gotten really good at SVGs, I used to rely on the nounproject for icons, and sometimes various libraries, but now coding agents just synthesize an SVG tag in the code and draw all icons.

Re: Gemini 3 Deep Think drew me a good SVG of a pelican riding a bicycle

#15
SVG generation is a surprisingly good benchmark for spatial reasoning because it forces the model to work in a coordinate system with no visual feedback loop. You have to hold a mental model of what the output looks like while emitting raw path data and transforms. It's closer to how a blind sculptor works than how an image diffusion model works.

What I find interesting is that Deep Think's chain-of-thought approach helps here — you can actually watch it reason about where the pedals should be relative to the wheels, which is something that trips up models that try to emit the SVG in one shot. The deliberative process maps well to compositional visual tasks.

Re: Gemini 3 Deep Think drew me a good SVG of a pelican riding a bicycle

#16

The intensity of competition between models is so intense right now they are definitely benchmaxxing pelican on bike SVGs and Will Smith spaghetti dinner videos.

There was Lenna for digital image compression (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lenna).

A pelican on a bike is SFW, inclusive, yet cool.

It is not a full benchmark - rather a litmus test.

Re: Gemini 3 Deep Think drew me a good SVG of a pelican riding a bicycle

#17
post #6

I don't think this is a good "benchmark" anymore. It's probably on everyone's training set by now.

I think it could still be an interesting benchmark. Like, assuming AI companies are genuinely trying to solve this pelican problem, how well do they solve it? That seems valid, and the assumption here is that the approach they take could generalize, which seems plausible.

Re: Gemini 3 Deep Think drew me a good SVG of a pelican riding a bicycle

#18
For those claiming they rigged it. Do you have any concrete evidence? What if the models have just gotten really good?

I just asked Gemini pro to generate an SVG of an octopus dunking a basketball and it did a great job. Not even Deep Think model. Then I did "generate an svg of raccoon at a beach drinking a beer" you can go try this out yourself. Ask it to generate anything you want in SVG. use your imagination.

Rant: This is why AI is going to take over, folks are not even trying the least.

Re: Gemini 3 Deep Think drew me a good SVG of a pelican riding a bicycle

#19

For those claiming they rigged it. Do you have any concrete evidence? What if the models have just gotten really good? I just asked Gemini pro to generate an SVG of an octopus dunking a basketball and it did a great job. Not even Deep Think model. Then I did "generate an svg of raccoon at a beach drinking a beer" you can go try this out yourself. Ask it to generate anything you want in SVG. use your imagination. Rant…

> What if the models have just gotten really good?

Kagi Assistant remains my main way of interacting with AI. One of its benefits is you're encouraged to try different models.

The heterogeneity in competence, particular per unit in time, is growing rapidly. If I'm extrapolating image-creation capabilities from Claude, I'm going to underestimate what Gemini can do without fuckery. Likewise, if I'm using Grok all day, Gemini and Claude will seem unbelievably competent when it comes to deep research.

Re: Gemini 3 Deep Think drew me a good SVG of a pelican riding a bicycle

#20

The intensity of competition between models is so intense right now they are definitely benchmaxxing pelican on bike SVGs and Will Smith spaghetti dinner videos.

So, again, when the indicator becomes a target, it stops being a good indicator.

> when the indicator becomes a target, it stops being a good indicator

But it's still a fair target. Unless it's hard coded into Gemini 3 DT, for which we have no evidence and decent evidence against, I'd say it's still informative.

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