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points by simonw 3 days ago | 0 comments

Pelicans for GPT-6.1 Terra: https://tools.simonwillison.net/markdown-svg-renderer?url=ht...

Interesting that both "none" and "low" reasoning levels appeared not to spend any reasoning tokens at all, and in fact low ended up using less tokens and costing less than none here.

"medium" did use 496 reasoning tokens, but that's apparently not enough here to return a visible reasoning trace.

OpenAI's current frontier model lineup is gpt-6-astra, gpt-6.1-sol, gpt-6.1-terra, gpt-6-luna, so here's a comparison grid of all of their pelicans at different reasoning levels: https://static.simonwillison.net/static/2026/openai-pelicans...

[–] AISnakeOil 3 days ago

What's the point of using it without reasoning? Isn't that what Luna's for?

[–] simonw 3 days ago

It's neat that we can now compare the Terra without reasoning pelican (cost 0.64 cents) with the equivalently priced Luna with reasoning pelicans (Luna xhigh is 0.40 cents, Luna max is 0.91 cents). I think the Terra low one compares favorably to those, though I'd suggest also comparing them on tasks more representative of real work than generating pelican SVGs!

[–] RussianCow 3 days ago

Terra without reasoning is almost certainly going to be faster than Luna on High (which is roughly equivalent in intelligence according to AA).

[–] notatoad 3 days ago

a bigger model still has more built-in knowledge to draw from, even without reasoning.

[–] shonenknifefan1 3 days ago

I appreciate that most of these pelicans are not holding the handlebars, i think that's more realistic than the alternative

[–] bitexploder 3 days ago

I just got GGUF Q4 XL Qwen Flash Next 3.8 working on my V100 engine: https://stealthgoat.com/fnfl/pelicans.html

4 pelicans at once!

[–] kubb 3 days ago

Do you have an agent scanning the front page waiting to post the pelicans?

[–] simonw 3 days ago

I should do but no, it's just a bad HN habit.

[–] pietz 3 days ago

I can literally see what the training data sample looked like that they included, so it performs well on this benchmark.

[–] drewbitt 3 days ago

12 seconds for a pelican on low. Pretty good.

[–] bigcat12345678 3 days ago

Seems Gemini is way ahead in pelican drawing

[–] thimabi 3 days ago

Apparently Google made it a point to train their models to output SVG, among other things, so that helps