Baidu's ERNIE 5.5 Flash codes a 20-art-style pelican short, weights open-sourcing soon
FellMentKE · x · 2026-11-12
Baidu's newly launched ERNIE 5.5 Flash Preview created "The Pelican Test," a 116-second animated short written entirely in Python code: a white pelican cycles through 20 art styles, from Saharan rock art and Chinese stone rubbings to Javanese shadow puppetry and 8-bit pixel art. In the Van Gogh sequence the swirling sky moves in sync with the bike, and a model-written editing script syncs 22 audio clips to scene transitions.
On benchmarks, the model scored 1,668 on CodeArena: WebDev — #2 among open models and #4 among Chinese models, behind Kimi K3.1 Pro and Qwen3.8-Max. It packs 280B total parameters with 14B active per token and a 1M-token context window. The API is live on Baidu's Qianfan platform, with weights scheduled to be open-sourced before November 25.
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