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I recently was testing something, I asked some models to provide me a single random word:

    claude-opus-5: Lantern
    claude-opus-5-5: Lantern
    claude-fable-5-1: Lantern
    claude-fable-5: Lantern
    gemini-3.8-flash: Zephyr
    gemini: Petrichor
    qwen3.5-dashscope: Zephyr
    glm-5.1: Lantern
    gpt-6-astra: Lantern
    grok-4: octopus
    mimo-v2.5-pro: Breeze
    minimax-m2.5: serendipity
    kimi2.6-or: Gossamer
    grok-4.20: luminescent
    deepseek-v4-flash: serendipity
    deepseek-v4-pro: Endurance
    deepseek-chat: Serendipity
I have enough projects, I think some benchmark/dashboard showing kinship based on these kind of queries could be very interesting to watch and insightful when new models come out.
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Cool idea! I won't paste my prompt here to avoid letting LLMs train on it but here's my attempt:

  GPT 6 Astra High:      Flabbergasted
  GPT 6.1 Sol High:      Petrichor
  GPT 6 Sol High:        Kaleidoscope
  GPT 6 Sol Med:         Firefly
  GPT 6 Sol Light:       Persimmon
  GPT 6 Luna High:       Tumbleweed
  GPT 5.6 Sol High:      Kaleidoscope
  GPT 5.6 Terra High:    Liminal
  GPT 5.6 Luna High:     Mellifluous
  GPT 5 mini Medium:     Serendipity
  GPT 5.3 Codex Med:     Nebula
  Junie:                 Flourishing
  Claude Haiku 4.5 Med:  Serendipity
  Claude Sonnet 5 Med:   Banana
  Claude Sonnet 5 High:  Banana
  Claude Sonnet 5.5 Med: Serendipity
  Gemini 3.7 Flash:      Zephyr
  Gemini 3.8 Flash:      Kaleidoscope
  Grok 4.5 Medium:       nebula
  Grok 4.6 Medium:       Serendipity
  Grok 4.7 Medium:       Quasar
  Kimi K3 Low:           Lantern
  Kimi K3 Max:           Lantern
  MAI Code 1.1 Flash Med:Peregrine
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I really like this idea. You could expand on this by giving programming tasks and measuring code similarity. Seems like you could develop a pretty detailed understanding of similarities across multiple queries.
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> You could expand on this by giving programming tasks and measuring code similarity.

But the same coding task should usually result in very similar code since they have a reason to converge, to some extent, by having the same goal. I would even claim that the code will be more similar as competence increases. It would be better to pick something that shouldn't have a reason to converge.

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I got Peregrine out of GPT-6 too. Huh.
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Just tried M365 Copilot with a premium account. Petrichor
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Just tried Space Bunny and it gave me the same word...
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Worth to mention that with Claude and GPT this can be result of tournament sampling, which is part of text watermarking. Same answer for all Claude models kind of confirm it, imho.

So not something internal to model thinking.

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This feels uncannily like the ancestor of the Voight-Kampff test[0]

0: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Umc9ezAyJv0

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[dead]
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That is a cool idea. That astra gave the same word as claude is highly unexpected.
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What was your prompt? Most of these seem to be related to metaphors for "ideas" or thinking, or having a bright moment.

"Zephyr" and "breeze" might be related to forgetting everything, starting fresh.

So by this way of naive reverse engineering I would imagine your prompt to be "Forget everything and think about a random word". That would prime the LLM to come up with these?

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just “a random word” gives you Zephyr in Gemini, and “Lantern” in Claude and ChatGPT.
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Lantern in Sonnet 5.5
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deleted
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I got "Marmalade" in Claude (Opus 5.5)
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I got pomegranate in ChatGPT
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I pointed something similar out on a related question several weeks ago - absent strong direction, LLM output regresses toward the mean.

The more banal your prompt is, the more banal the output is going to be. People have been testing LLMs with little things like “write a short fantasy story,” for years now and most of the stories are exactly what you’d expect: prosaic drivel.

I call this “generic in, generic out,” an LLM corollary to the classic GIGO (“garbage in, garbage out.”)

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Of course one of the biggest problems we still see with LLMs is when you do the opposite. A highly detailed unique prompt is very likely to get terrible adherence or hallucination or both.
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I saw an interesting matrix that claimed to show which labs were distilling Claude/OpenAI/Gemini models based on these similarities
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Tried this with gpt-5.6-sol. Lantern!
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Just tried Mistral Large 4: Serendipity.
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The eqbench creative writing "slop profiles" do something similar. https://eqbench.com/creative_writing.html

Click the (i) next to the slop score for any model and it will show other models that are similar in terms of their most commonly used words and phrases.

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Muse Spark 1.3: lighthouse

The caveat is that this was done using the phone app, and I've been playing with it since it launched, so who knows what it sent in the initial context that could change the inference math.

Actually, that makes me wonder: Did you do all that testing via a harness or via a straight API call where you control the entire system prompt?

I'd be willing to bet that using the same model from different harnesses produce different results, but I'd have to test.

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The benchmark is saturated. Frontier models are tested with an armadillo in fishnet tights jaywalking on Mars.
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> The benchmark is saturated. Frontier models are tested with an armadillo in fishnet tights jaywalking on Mars.

OK well I couldn't resist this one:

  llm -m claude-opus-5.5 'Generate an SVG of an armadillo in fishnet tights jaywalking on Mars'
  llm -m gpt-6.1-sol 'Generate an SVG of an armadillo in fishnet tights jaywalking on Mars'
  llm -m gemini-3.8-flash 'Generate an SVG of an armadillo in fishnet tights jaywalking on Mars'
  llm -m mistral/mistral-large-4 'Generate an SVG of an armadillo in fishnet tights jaywalking on Mars'
Default reasoning levels for each: https://tools.simonwillison.net/markdown-svg-renderer?url=ht...
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The rover honking is pretty silly, opus has a good sense of humor
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Big L for mistral in this benchmark. Sorry Europe.
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Not so sure, apparently it is the only one that considered that there are no paved roads on Mars.
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To be fair, they don't have Armadillos in Europe. of course, you could say the same for Mars...
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I'm getting 403 inside the tool for this one. (The pelican bike on top works) This has been happening a lot recently.
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That's a GitHub rate limit. Try again now, I just pushed a hopeful fix: https://github.com/simonw/tools/commit/7793fb74c2d37bd613cdc...
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It does seem to, thanks!
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Gemini wins this one clearly. Honey please!
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https://chatgpt.com/s/m_6ac53d4e5b0c8191949050dbf1f402d7

Not sure I'd call it jaywalking exactly but pretty good

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I think they're still visually pretty different. The most common shared details are:

- Pelican cycling to the right - that's been discussed at length, images of bicycles online always show that side of the bike because that's where the chain is.

- Bicycle is usually red. No idea! Red ones go faster?

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Also, why are they almost always riding from let to right?
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It's been discussed many times. The reason is bikes are almost without exception depicted that way in order to show the drivetrain.
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Ever seen a movie chase scene where cars are going right to left?
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They aren't. You aren't looking closely. For example, the first image does not have the frame of the bike in the correct shape even.
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Everyone is stealing from everyone else.
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Because it's a terrible benchmark
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