Opus 5.5 had similar response on max: This is a classic test request
https://tools.simonwillison.net/markdown-svg-renderer?url=ht...
I think your test is already embedded into the models. You should search for new frontier tests to subject the models to. Maybe they should now try to unify the standard model and general relativity in physics. I'm pretty sure this is nowhere to be found in any training data nor shared in any chat between a scientist and a LLM ;)
> "What's up with the pelican?"
Well you see in the early days of LLMs we wanted a fun way to test new models, and there was this blog, ...
Even more so, because in a lot of their benchmarks they use the max models. I honestly think I'd rather these labs use their xhigh models as the default for benchmarking instead since I don't think the average person is even using max.
I'm definitely not the average person though.
I actually don't like that it sometimes remembers the last model/effort i used. I should be able to set a default model/effort that is separate from the one off fable runs I use.
The pelicans all start to look the same after a while.
But seeing the comparison to other models by class, family, or historical progression gives an excellent frame of reference.
Here's the Haiku 4.5 pelican from a year ago - it sucked in comparison to Haiku 5.5: https://simonwillison.net/2025/Oct/15/claude-haiku-45/
Here's a Blender model I had Claude Opus 5.5 create: https://tools.simonwillison.net/blender-viewer?url=https%3A%...
And here's some animated pixel art by Opus 5.5: https://tools.simonwillison.net/kakapo-party
And some Monkey Island style music (Opus can compose music too): https://tools.simonwillison.net/scrimshaw-jukebox
Anthropic's models do all of this by outputting code. GPT-6 Astra has similar capabilities - I got this Blender model using that: https://tools.simonwillison.net/blender-viewer?url=https%3A%...
They are still not great at SVG. I just asked Opus and Fable to add a background to an SVG and the results were, well, not great.
This creates Sierra AGI-style adventure game scenes painted live from simple Turtle-esque drawing instructions so you can basically provide it an empty canvas and then position text labels on the canvas where you want certain things (tavern, oak tree, etc) and it will generate a custom script for rendering them in a EGA graphics style.
Please don't judge me too harshly for this particular poop video. But here is an example of something 100% generated with claude prompts only.