Karpathy Highlights Simon Willison's 'Pelicans on Bicycles' LLM Eval Test

karpathy · x · 2026-08-03

Andrej Karpathy shared Simon Willison's keynote from the AI Engineer World's Fair, uploading the source code so it's playable and forkable in the browser.

Willison noted that with over 30 significant models released recently, traditional benchmarks and leaderboards are losing trust. He increasingly relies on his own eval: asking text-only LLMs to generate an SVG of a pelican riding a bicycle. This method tests the models' ability to understand and generate complex code, proving to be a surprisingly practical evaluation tool.

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