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The last six months in LLMs, illustrated by pelicans on bicycles

simonwillison.net

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Re: The last six months in LLMs, illustrated by pelicans on bicycles

#191

Post by zahlman »

diggan wrote: post #141
zahlman wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The colors use traditional bicycle brown (#8B4513) and a classic blue for the pelican (#4169E1) with gold accents for the beak (#FFD700). The output pelican is indeed blue. I can't fathom where the idea that this is "classic", or suitable for a pelican, could have come from.

My guess would be that it doesn't see the web colors (CSS color hexes) as proper hex triplets, but because of tokenization it could be something dumb like '#8B','451','3' instead. I think the same issue happens around multiple special characters after each other too.

No, it's understanding the colors properly. The SVG that the LLM created does use #4169E1 for the pelican color, and the LLM correctly describes this color as blue. The problem is that pelicans should not be blue.

Re: The last six months in LLMs, illustrated by pelicans on bicycles

#192

Post by pinoy420 »

azinman2 wrote: post #87
adrian17 wrote: post #81

> This was one of the most successful product launches of all time. They signed up 100 million new user accounts in a week! They had a single hour where they signed up a million new accounts, as this thing kept on going viral again and again and again. Awkwardly, I never heard of it until now. I was aware that at some point they added ability to generate images to the app, but I never realized it was a major thing (p…

Except this went very mainstream. Lots of turn myself into a muppet, what is the human equivalent for my dog, etc. TikTok is all over this. It really is incredible.

[dead]

Re: The last six months in LLMs, illustrated by pelicans on bicycles

#193

Post by Philpax »

andrepd wrote: post #182
bufferoverflow wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have you missed how everyone was Ghiblifying everything?

Oh you mean the trend of the day on the social media monoculture? I don't take that as an indicator of any significance.

One should not be proud of their ignorance.

Re: The last six months in LLMs, illustrated by pelicans on bicycles

#194

Post by DaSHacka »

Philpax wrote: post #193
andrepd wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh you mean the trend of the day on the social media monoculture? I don't take that as an indicator of any significance.

One should not be proud of their ignorance.

Except when it comes to using social media, where "ignorance" unironically is strength

Re: The last six months in LLMs, illustrated by pelicans on bicycles

#195

Post by oblio »

gretch wrote: post #177
jodrellblank wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it sounds far more likely that 100M people signed up to poke at the latest viral novelty and create one meme, than that 100M people suddenly discovered they had a pressing long-term need for AI images all on the same day. Doesn’t it?

It's neither of these options in this false dichotomy. 100M people signed up and did at least 1 task. Then, most likely some % of them discovered it was a useful thing (if for nothing else than just to make more memes), and converted into a MAU. If I had to use my intuition, I would say it's 5% - 10%, which represents a larger product launch than most developers will ever participate in, in the context of a single da…

Apparently OpenAI is losing money like crazy on this and their conversion rates to paid are abysmal, even for the cheaper licenses. And not even their top subscription covers its cost.

Uber at a 10x scale.

I should add that compared to the hype, at a global level Uber is a failure. Yes, it's still a big company, yes, it's profitable now, but I think it was launched 10+ years ago and it's barely becoming net profitabile over it's existence now and shows no signs of taking over the world. Sure, it's big in the US and a few specific markets. But elsewhere it's either banned for undermining labor practices or has stiff local competition or it's just not cost competitive and it won't enter the market because without the whole "gig economy" scam it's just a regular taxi company with a better app.

Re: The last six months in LLMs, illustrated by pelicans on bicycles

#197

Post by simonw »

oblio wrote: post #195
gretch wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's neither of these options in this false dichotomy. 100M people signed up and did at least 1 task. Then, most likely some % of them discovered it was a useful thing (if for nothing else than just to make more memes), and converted into a MAU. If I had to use my intuition, I would say it's 5% - 10%, which represents a larger product launch than most developers will ever participate in, in the context of a single da…

Apparently OpenAI is losing money like crazy on this and their conversion rates to paid are abysmal, even for the cheaper licenses. And not even their top subscription covers its cost. Uber at a 10x scale. I should add that compared to the hype, at a global level Uber is a failure. Yes, it's still a big company, yes, it's profitable now, but I think it was launched 10+ years ago and it's barely becoming net profitabi…

Is that information about their low conversion rates from credible sources?

Re: The last six months in LLMs, illustrated by pelicans on bicycles

#198

Post by [deleted] »

zahlman wrote: post #136
diggan wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Lets give it a try, if you're willing to be the experiment subject :) The prompt is "Generate an SVG of a pelican riding a bicycle" and you're supposed to write it by hand, so no graphical editor. The specification is here: https://www.w3.org/TR/SVG2/ I'm fairly certain I'd lose interest in getting it right before I got something better than most of those.

> The colors use traditional bicycle brown (#8B4513) and a classic blue for the pelican (#4169E1) with gold accents for the beak (#FFD700). The output pelican is indeed blue. I can't fathom where the idea that this is "classic", or suitable for a pelican, could have come from.

[deleted]

Re: The last six months in LLMs, illustrated by pelicans on bicycles

#199

Post by cap11235 »

diggan wrote: post #141
zahlman wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The colors use traditional bicycle brown (#8B4513) and a classic blue for the pelican (#4169E1) with gold accents for the beak (#FFD700). The output pelican is indeed blue. I can't fathom where the idea that this is "classic", or suitable for a pelican, could have come from.

My guess would be that it doesn't see the web colors (CSS color hexes) as proper hex triplets, but because of tokenization it could be something dumb like '#8B','451','3' instead. I think the same issue happens around multiple special characters after each other too.

Qwen3, at least, tokenizes each character of "#8B4513" separately.

Re: The last six months in LLMs, illustrated by pelicans on bicycles

#200

Post by oblio »

simonw wrote: post #197
oblio wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apparently OpenAI is losing money like crazy on this and their conversion rates to paid are abysmal, even for the cheaper licenses. And not even their top subscription covers its cost. Uber at a 10x scale. I should add that compared to the hype, at a global level Uber is a failure. Yes, it's still a big company, yes, it's profitable now, but I think it was launched 10+ years ago and it's barely becoming net profitabi…

Is that information about their low conversion rates from credible sources?

It's quite hard to say for sure, and I will prefix my comment by saying his blog posts are very long and quite doomerist about LLMs, but he makes a decent case about OpenAI financials:

https://www.wheresyoured.at/wheres-the-money/

https://www.wheresyoured.at/openai-is-a-systemic-risk-to-the...

A very solid argument is like that against propaganda: it's not so much about what is being said but what about isn't. OpenAI is basically shouting about every minor achievement from the rooftops so the fact that they are remarkably silent about financial fundamentals says something. At best something mediocre or more likely bad.

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