Are AI Labs Pelicanmaxxing?

In one line

I generated 1,000+ SVGs across 7 frontier models to test whether AI labs are training on Simon Willison’s pelican-riding-a-bicycle benchmark.

Opening excerpt

For the past few years, Simon Willison has tested every major LLM release with the same prompt: “Generate an SVG of a pelican riding a bicycle”.

What began as a tongue-in-cheek benchmark has become one of the most famous informal benchmarks in AI. Simon’s pelican-on-a-bicycle results are often among the most upvoted comments on Hacker News threads announcing new releases from AI labs.

The benchmark is now famous enough that there’s plenty of discussion about its usefulness and about whether AI labs might be benchmaxxing 1 on it. When billions or even trillions of dollars are at stake, and a strong result could help persuade users, wouldn’t it be tempting to pelicanmaxx your model just a bit?

I wanted to find out, so I put together a small experiment. I generated 1,008 SVGs across seven frontier models, scored them with an LLM judge, and used Claude Fable 5 for the analysis.

(Excerpted from the original; full article via the source link below.)