A good new benchmark should have awful performance to start and there should be a lot of headroom for improvement. This benchmark is also intentionally difficult and requires the LLM to develop the animation through spatial reasoning and first principals rather than existing video generation pipelines. Similar to how SVG generation was out of distribution for most models a year ago.
it made a huge monstrosity first, 1500+ lines of shader code. Once it was happy with the result (it looked pretty good, almost blenders gamerenderer) it cleaned it up and a lot of debug code was removed. shrank it down to about 350 lines and made it much more readable.
this was something i didnt expect it to be able to do. create shaders, look at screenshots, fix em iteratively like that. multi modal debugging.
Imho we don’t need to make benchmarks that draw the whole 3D world. Pelican’s drawing is really nice in its simplicity and complexity at the same time.
It seems to be an obscene waste of compute time to generate useless 3D worlds that are just a bragging - 3D is really heavy discipline to make it right, see Mark Zuckerberg’s ceased attempt with 3D VR…
Multiply it by thousands times as a lot of people have found out threejs lib and prompt “generate 3D world and make no mistake” are new orange/black.
As for the often quoted issues with the bike's frame or problem with the steering column, I can't really tell, I am no bike expert.
I can instead judge how poor of a job it is doing with a LOTR rendition in Three.js, so that seems like a better benchmark.
No, this demo is the useless 3D world, and you're bragging.
A real game would have a lot more immersive of a world, and you wouldn't need to.
Spaghetti 2026:
https://x.com/dreamingtulpa/status/2083304533829066873
https://xcancel.com/dreamingtulpa/status/2083304533829066873
I have always preferred the result of getting an LLM to draw an svg or make a procedural animation like this to the uncanny hyper-realistic result of diffusion image/video generation.
Given that limitation, it is incredible what it can still accomplish. And when it falls short, it is often in a charming way, if you are open to seeing it that way. It reflects something like a child's understanding of the world, not entirely wrong, just incomplete.
The fluttering cubes that might have been bees or butterflies were my favorite part.
Anyway, just a small point which probably still wouldn't change the nice metaphor your made.
https://www.booooooom.com/2016/05/09/bicycles-built-based-on...
Elon Musk on Grok: “better than PhD level in everything.”
Totally agree though, anyone with a vague understanding of how bikes works ignores the pelican because they know the bike is unrideable in the first place.
They are listening.
I am not a mechanical engineer, so even prompting well with ME lingo probably will take some effort.
But I do think this was a poor demonstration of the idea for another reason: Tolkien works have a HUGE corpus of training data. It's great that random users can come in and immediately recognize what the footage is, but it fails at the very first thing the pelican was meant to do:
- Render this thing you have only tangential training data of, that also happens to be an asymmetrical object so we can see how much you fuck up the details if you somehow flip the orientation half the time.
They should have used an obscure story, not "Most Studied Piece of Literally Work of The Past Century trademarksymbol"