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2026
1 article
15 Sep
2026
Pelican on a Bicycle is the New Carwash
In the same February week, the car-wash prompt went viral and Google’s Jeff Dean posted an animated pelican riding a bicycle. Seven months later the car wash has been absorbed into proper benchmarks, and as a single pass/fail prompt it has little left to say. The pelican has become the launch-day ritual instead. This post looks at why a generated artifact outlasts a question with one right answer: information theory, paired comparisons, SVG geometry, the psychology of drawing bicycles, and what happens when the pelican starts to move and has to obey kinematics. It also looks at why the pelican is heading for the car wash’s fate.
llm
evaluation
benchmarks