Every new model you make this post, every time there’s someone who posits it might be trained on, and every time the answer is “maybe but probably not” it’s not a worthwhile conversation to have at this point, either the models can do some arbitrary thing or they can’t.
The answer is “they are definitely in the training set”.
They all generate the same composition and style because this has become a self-reinforcing loop. They seem to reproduce a specific solution from memory instead of designing from scratch.
"I chose that because a) I like pelicans and b) I'm pretty sure there aren't any pelican on a bicycle SVG files floating around (yet) that might have already been sucked into the training data."
That's no longer true. Every new model gets a blog post with its pelican SVG in it, and that ends up on the web like everything else. Haiku 5.5 and Opus 5.5 now say "this is the classic pelican benchmark" in their reasoning traces. People keep pointing this out and it keeps getting dismissed.
I, for one, don't see the point anymore. The reason for running the test is gone. I just don't get why we still treat the results as meaningful.
This time, just seeing the difference between Haiku 4.5 (a year ago) and Haiku 5.5 (today - and 1/10th the cost) was worth it alone.
Same for Mistral the other day - the leap from Mistral Large 3 (their previous best model) to Mistral Large 4 was similar to the Haiku 4.5 to 5.5 jump.
I wrote some more thoughts about what value we can still get from the pelican test back in July - https://simonwillison.net/2026/Jul/16/kimi-k3/#what-can-we-l... but I've actually become MORE confident in its ongoing value since then. Using it to compare reasoning levels is proving particularly useful at the moment.
Can you share in what ways these learnings affect your decisions or behaviors?
The hn community is diverse. Of course some people will be tired of it but if enough people are engaging with the pelican test I would say that is likely because it still has some relevance.
But apparently we are in the minority since the pelicans are always upvoted to the top, so if others have fun with it then whatever, fair enough.