# pelican-riding-a-bicycle Published articles for pelican-riding-a-bicycle. This is one page of public article previews, not the complete archive. Follow Next page to continue. Summaries are not the original full articles. ## The Pelican comparison grid for Astra is pretty interesting DevFeed: [The Pelican comparison grid for Astra is pretty interesting]() Original publisher: [Read original article]() Author: Simon Willison Published: 2026-09-04T23:59:05Z Content type: opinion Language: en Sources: [Simon Willison]() Topics: [gpt-6-astra]() Tags: [ai](), [ai-2-235](), [comparison](), [cost](), [generative-ai](), [generative-ai-1-981](), [gpt-6-astra](), [gpt-6-astra-9](), [images](), [llms](), [llms-1-947](), [model](), [openai](), [openai-463](), [pelican-riding-a-bicycle](), [pelican-riding-a-bicycle-142](), [reasoning]() ### AI overview The article compares GPT-6 Astra with GPT-5.6 Sol, Terra, and Luna by generating SVG pelicans riding bicycles at different reasoning levels. The author finds Astra's images generally better, while noting that lower reasoning levels can omit pelican legs and that Astra may cost more but use fewer tokens. ### Source excerpt I got access to GPT-6 Astra this afternoon, so naturally I used it to generate SVGs of pelicans riding bicycles - at low, medium, high, xhigh and max reasoning levels (Astra doesn't support reasoning=none). Then I rendered those pelicans in a comparison grid with GPT-5.6 Sol, Terra, and Luna, and beyond being fun the result was surprisingly useful. See the grid for full quality images. Here's the transcript that created the GPT-6 Nova pelicans. There are a few interesting things that stand out from this grid. The Astra pelicans are much better. The very best GPT-5.6-Sol pelican (I liked xhigh better than max) is still pretty clearly a bunch of abstract shapes. Every single one of the Astra pelicans, from low to xhigh, looks better than that. The Astra max one is really good. Astra below max still doesn't reliably get the pelican legs on both sides of the frame. In terms of cost, Astra may be around twice the price of Sol ($10/million input, $50/million output, compared to $5/$30 for Sol), but it uses significantly less tokens at each of the levels, making the prices at the different levels closer than they might otherwise be. Astra low produces a better pelican than ANY of the GPT-5.6 Sol models at any level, for 9.55 cents. Spending 10 cents on any other model gets a much worse result. Look at the input token counts: Astra and Luna both used 16 input tokens, Sol and Terra used 26. That's interesting. I wonder if Astra and Luna are more related to each other than OpenAI let on? You are only seeing the long-form articles from my blog. Subscribe to /atom/everything/ to get all of my posts, or take a look at my other subscription options. ## Claude Fable 5.1: Benchmark results and reasoning-effort experiments DevFeed: [Claude Fable 5.1: Benchmark results and reasoning-effort experiments]() Original publisher: [Read original article]() Author: Simon Willison Published: 2026-09-01T23:57:28Z Content type: article Language: en Sources: [Simon Willison]() Topics: [Fable](), [Benchmark](), [coding](), [Large Language Model](), [SVG]() Tags: [ai](), [ai-2-235](), [anthropic](), [anthropic-336](), [benchmark](), [benchmarks](), [claude](), [claude-310](), [coding](), [fable](), [generative-ai](), [generative-ai-1-981](), [llm](), [llm-reasoning](), [llm-reasoning-103](), [llm-release](), [llm-release-231](), [llms](), [llms-1-947](), [models](), [pelican-riding-a-bicycle](), [pelican-riding-a-bicycle-142](), [reasoning](), [svg]() ### AI overview The article examines Claude Fable 5.1 through benchmark results and a pelican SVG-generation experiment across its five reasoning-effort levels. It reports that low and medium settings appeared to skip reasoning for this prompt, while higher effort used more tokens, time, and cost. ### Source excerpt Today is Claude Fable (and Mythos) 5.1 day. Anthropic say that Fable 5.1 "sets a new standard for coding, knowledge work, and long-running problem-solving tasks". Their announcement spends a notable amount of time on scientific research, boasting of a 52.6% score on the brand new Terminal-Bench-Science 0.1 benchmark (first announced on August 27th), up from 24.7% for Fable 5, 29.0% for Opus 5 and 22.4% for GPT-5.6 Sol. Other benchmarks show slightly improved scores, but none as impressive as the Science one. But how well can it pelican? Back in July I wrote about how I was losing faith in the pelican benchmark - its connection to how good the models were at other tasks didn't seem to hold as strongly as it did back in 2025. The most interesting insights I get from it now are comparisons within model families, and particularly comparisons for the same prompt at different reasoning effort levels. Fable 5.1 has five reasoning levels: low, medium, high, xhigh, max - and no option to turn off reasoning entirely. I fixed an issue in llm-anthropic which caused reasoning traces not to be correctly recorded, then ran some prompts. Here's the full set of pelicans for all of the reasoning levels, each with the full reasoning transcript. I'll replicate them here: Low and medium, both without reasoning? Next, a bit of a mystery. This is what I got for effort low: The transcript doesn't show any summarized reasoning tokens, and the output token count is 1,998. With Claude that output token count includes reasoning tokens. It took 23.8 seconds and cost 10.017 cents. I bumped that up to medium and got this: Weirdly, that one also shows no reasoning text and used 1,977 output tokens - 21 tokens less than low. It took 23 seconds and cost 9.912 cents. So for this particular prompt ("Generate an SVG of a pelican riding a bicycle") Fable 5.1 appeared to skip reasoning entirely at both low and medium settings. High Here's high - 29.6 seconds, 2,612 output tokens, 13.087 cents: This one d ## Qwen 3.8 27B is excellent, but it defaults to wildly overthinking things DevFeed: [Qwen 3.8 27B is excellent, but it defaults to wildly overthinking things]() Original publisher: [Read original article]() Author: Simon Willison Published: 2026-08-16T22:00:39Z Content type: opinion Language: en Sources: [Simon Willison]() Topics: [qwen](), [Large Language Model](), [Hardware](), [DGX Spark](), [NVIDIA DGX](), [SVG]() Tags: [ai](), [ai-2-235](), [ai-in-china](), [ai-in-china-108](), [coding-agents](), [coding-agents-248](), [cost](), [dgx-spark](), [generative-ai](), [generative-ai-1-981](), [llama-cpp](), [llama-cpp-29](), [llm](), [llm-reasoning](), [llm-reasoning-103](), [llm-release](), [llm-release-231](), [llms](), [llms-1-947](), [lm-studio](), [lm-studio-23](), [local-llms](), [local-llms-164](), [nvidia-dgx](), [nvidia-spark](), [nvidia-spark-6](), [pelican-riding-a-bicycle](), [pelican-riding-a-bicycle-142](), [pi](), [pi-6](), [qwen](), [qwen-61](), [reasoning](), [speed](), [svg]() ### AI overview Simon Willison evaluates Qwen 3.8 27B, a vision-capable 27-billion-parameter LLM that can run locally on suitable hardware. He finds that its default xhigh reasoning setting consumes substantial context and time, while adjusting the reasoning effort and increasing the context limit improves practicality. He also reports strong results generating an SVG locally. ### Source excerpt Friday's big release was Qwen 3.8 27B, an Apache 2 licensed 27B parameter vision-capable LLM from Alibaba's Qwen research lab. I've been looking forward to this one: 27B is an excellent size for running a model on a reasonably specced laptop, and its predecessor Qwen 3.6 27B was impressive. Qwen's self-reported benchmarks for this model are eye-opening. They show a boost from both Qwen 3.6 27B and the closed-weight Qwen 3.7-Plus, which was one of Qwen's strongest models of any size as recently as May this year. It will be interesting to hear what independent benchmarks have to say about the model. I've been running the model on two different machines: my 128GB M5 Max MacBook Pro, and an NVIDIA DGX Spark. On both machines I'm running LM Studio and their 17GB Q4_K_M quantized build. I also tried using llama-server directly on the Spark. The default of extra high results in spectacular over-thinking Qwen's documentation describes the model as defaulting to xhigh for the reasoning effort, and the LM Studio GGUF I've been trying preserves that default: Qwen3.8 comes with official support for reasoning_effort, which can be used to adjust reasoning depth and control cost: xhigh (default): for complex tasks demanding thorough analysis medium: balancing accuracy and speed low: efficient reasoning optimizing for speed and cost This is a hilarious default. It's absolutely not a good way to run the model, especially on consumer hardware. I've been finding the results extremely entertaining. I quickly ran into problems with LM Studio's default context limit of 8,192 tokens - Qwen was using them all up thinking about even the most mundane of problems. I loaded the model with the full 262,144 maximum context length and that problem went away. Here's the pelican riding a bicycle SVG I got from my first attempt with that increased context length. It took 21 minutes to generate, using 22,276 reasoning tokens to produce 3,223 tokens of output. You can read the reasoning trace here. Th