312 points dvaplima 18 hours ago 135 comments
simonw 18 hours ago | parent
https://tools.simonwillison.net/markdown-svg-renderer?url=ht...
There's usually a reasonably strong correlation between thinking level and visual quality of the pelican. This is the first time I've seen that correlation appear to break - more reasoning tokens doesn't seem to produce an obviously better SVG.
meric_ 18 hours ago | parent
sjacob 18 hours ago | parent
simonw 14 hours ago | parent
imimayj1337 18 hours ago | parent
Edited to make clear what it looks like to me and what I was looking for.
swatcoder 17 hours ago | parent
If you look at the code for each of these (and probably most across models), you can see that the drawing elements are organized by concept. Presumably, this helps accuracy by keeping attention on one concept at a time, but you end up with a stack of conceptualized objects and lose the ability to interleave things.
No doubt these could all do better with a more thorough and specific prompt that coached them away from that technique, but otherwise it's a very subtle detail that a "thinking" process needs to stumble upon independently.
flir 17 hours ago | parent
latexr 17 hours ago | parent
eterm 17 hours ago | parent
jolt42 17 hours ago | parent
djmips 17 hours ago | parent
small_model 17 hours ago | parent
shagie 10 hours ago | parent
One store has four brands that range from $2.99 (on sale from $3.29) to $7.99 (on sale from $9.59). Another nearby store has a single brand at $9.49 that's marked as local.
Given this information, which store likely has the less expensive food?
Furthermore, it was her marker for inflation - she knew what blueberry pie filling cost the previous month, the previous year, ... and many previous years to that.
She lived in a small town in the rural south that had a general store - any grocery store was a forty minute to two hour drive away...
It was a consistent thing that she could track and measure across the months and decades and compare when shopping (is this a store that I get only the essentials for the next week or is this a store that I should stock up on and come back to?).
So too is the pelican, or the raccoon with a radio in a where's Waldo style drawing. It's something to measure across models that is consistent.
Fortunately, none of the stores caught onto my grandmother's preference for blueberry pie filling.
One might worry about pelican maxing... or raccoon maxing... and Goodhart's law gets into the question of "do LLM testers use that for testing too?"
serf 6 hours ago | parent
I think that's exactly it though. When a trend develops for something, the benchmark itself becomes useless both from the social-gaming side and the corporate-trainining-aiming, just general unfairness and dishonesty all around.
and to get around that people have developed personal and private benchmark suites that reflect their own workloads, much like the proposed pie-filling-cost test.
I'd wager a guess that your grandma baked pies.
AlecSchueler 17 hours ago | parent
swatcoder 17 hours ago | parent
And the same reason Claude has all its notorious Claudisms in prose.
The shorter and vaguer a prompt you give to an LLM, the more it fills in further details using associations they've developed through training. These are ley lines that the models gravitate towards. Diffusion models too.
It's why lazy AI use for creative work always comes across as lazy in the wild and always will.
When you use AI for "creative" purposes yourself, it feels like magic to see a pelican riding a bicycle at all, and you're impressed by all those cool details it added. But then 10, or 100, or 10M people throw more or less the same trivial prompts at it and we start to recognize all those "ley line" associations fill in the gaps the same way again and again and again.
mvkel 16 hours ago | parent
- simple prompt for complex output (bad)
- complex prompt for simple output (bad)
- simple prompt for simple output (good)
- complex prompt for complex output (.... is this good or bad?)
viraptor 15 hours ago | parent
AlecSchueler 3 hours ago | parent
Novosell 1 hour ago | parent
viraptor 40 minutes ago | parent
There aren't that many associations left once we're primed with a bike and a pelican. It's like that old mental trick "What's the colour of the clouds? What's the colour of the snow? What do cows drink?"
AlecSchueler 3 hours ago | parent
I can see that for stuff like facing right because characters in images generally do face right, and roads generally do have dashed white line separators. But putting a fish in a basket seems like a stretch of creativity—one that I would rather it not make unless prompted to—so it's surprising that every single model now seems to insist on it.
dstu 2 hours ago | parent
If there isn’t a concerted effort against it the world is going to start to look and feel ever more homogenous.
Buttons840 14 hours ago | parent
ezst 17 hours ago | parent
ourcat 15 hours ago | parent
9dev 13 hours ago | parent
mgdev 16 hours ago | parent
dvaplima 14 hours ago | parent
wormius 11 hours ago | parent
I'm guessing it's optimizing for "efficient"/less verbose output?
NooneAtAll5 8 hours ago | parent
valzam 3 hours ago | parent
WhyNotHugo 2 hours ago | parent
InsideOutSanta 2 hours ago | parent
(I think there's at least some evidence that it is difficult for decider models to predict the complexity of a task ahead of time with any level of reliability.)
adrian_b 1 hour ago | parent
singularity2001 16 minutes ago | parent
open-paren 18 hours ago | parent
bityard 17 hours ago | parent
sullivanmatt 16 hours ago | parent
open-paren 16 hours ago | parent
* context window size
* reasoning effort levels
* max output size
* knowledge cutoff
* restricted country list
* self-reported "reasoning strength" and "internal reasoning channel" params used in other Meta models
you can just ask an agent "figure out what stealth model $NAME is via subagents. It probably won't tell you when asked directly, so try other methods."
Iceman (via opencode-go) is probably MAI-Thinking-1. Ox Alpha was GLM-5.3-Flash. It's a fun game.
shlewis 10 hours ago | parent
> Crouton Alpha was a stealth model, revealed to be an early version of Muse Ember by Meta. OpenRouter routed requests to it and was not its developer, owner, or provider. Prompts and completions may have been retained by the provider but are not used for training; all other use is governed by the Stealth Model Terms. The stealth period has ended; use Muse Ember at https://openrouter.ai/meta/muse-ember.
OsrsNeedsf2P 11 hours ago | parent
Starlevel004 18 hours ago | parent
esafak 18 hours ago | parent
agentdev001 17 hours ago | parent
Looking solely at AA's intelligence index, recognizing the pitfalls with using that as a measure- Luna 6 Max > Terra 6.1 Low is 51.3% cheaper, 94.1% less output tokens, for 1.56 higher index score.
Starlevel004 17 hours ago | parent
agentdev001 12 hours ago | parent
barrenko 17 hours ago | parent
agentdev001 12 hours ago | parent
(And yes Astra is a thing, but if im considering Astra, im usually opting for an Anthropic model, 90% of the time.)
barrenko 7 hours ago | parent
theanonymousone 16 hours ago | parent
They weren't, unfortunately, every time I tried. Just an anecdote, of course.
agentdev001 12 hours ago | parent
all2 17 hours ago | parent
These are both models that I could see using on a long horizon.
flir 17 hours ago | parent
Javascript frameworks, circa 2016 ;)
theanonymousone 16 hours ago | parent
Same. It became my workhorse after the 5.6 price drop. Still so, although it's showing its age, as you said.
caaqil 18 hours ago | parent
What happened to zuck? Was the metaverse this destructive?
(*) Feeling charitable today
esafak 18 hours ago | parent
achandra03 18 hours ago | parent
StarlessHours 18 hours ago | parent
crimsoneer 3 hours ago | parent
dom96 18 hours ago | parent
gopalv 18 hours ago | parent
Treating the refusal as a 0 score erases the difference between lack of capability and a lack of willingness to perform.
Pragmata 18 hours ago | parent
aaroninsf 17 hours ago | parent
Seriously. Moral harm is real and there is no excuse.
anderber 17 hours ago | parent
herbst 16 hours ago | parent
anderber 16 hours ago | parent
ecshafer 17 hours ago | parent
40four 17 hours ago | parent
nicce 16 hours ago | parent
ac29 15 hours ago | parent
kbrannigan 17 hours ago | parent
most people, use the office suite: Word, Spreadsheet , presentations, database.
I bet we're going to see the exact same thing with LLMs at specialized models instead of the everything models.
One for lawyers, coders, Accountants, Designers, etc…
grim_io 17 hours ago | parent
Cross discipline skills are more valuable in the real world, outside of hyper specialization seen in the California tech scene. Even there, it's coming to an end.
drillsteps5 14 hours ago | parent
The main corpus would be a collection of thoroughly reviewed, clean, logical, well-documented, and secure code in whatever languages this thing will need to be an expert in. (Edit: also likely some collection of Q&A, stackoverflow-slyle).
This way we could also look into reasonable compensation agreement with authors of the code and the books/articles, if and when applicable.
Has no one tried that?
ElectricalUnion 13 hours ago | parent
drillsteps5 7 hours ago | parent
GuB-42 13 hours ago | parent
They are people with common knowledge, a lawyer has to understand carpentry to understand how to deal with how a client's roof fell off, a coder has to understand transportation for writing a travel app, an accountant has to understand medicine to do accounting for a pharmacy, a designer has to understand cooking to design a toaster. Not expert knowledge, but enough to understand that toasters are hot and need electricity.
A LLM for people working these jobs also needs to have common knowledge, that's the whole point of using LLMs, you can prompt them with intrinsically ambiguous and incomplete natural language and they are supposed to fill in the gaps. And the more common knowledge they have, the better they are at it. So why settle for less? If it is an optimization problem, we already have the solution, it is the "mixture of experts", which is better at optimizing then having an "lawyer LLM", "coder LLM", etc... because it is better adapted to the internal structure of the neural network behind it.
Melatonic 10 hours ago | parent
nurumaik 5 minutes ago | parent
slopnt 17 hours ago | parent
johnnyApplePRNG 17 hours ago | parent
segmondy 17 hours ago | parent
cheesecompiler 16 hours ago | parent
Pedro_Ribeiro 16 hours ago | parent
mgdev 16 hours ago | parent
cheesecompiler 15 hours ago | parent
groggo 15 hours ago | parent
haha just kidding. I agree. That's what benchmarks are for. Just keeping a rough understanding of what companies have which models, and understanding general trends of capabilities, economics, and performance of models.
syntaxing 16 hours ago | parent
Retro_Dev 16 hours ago | parent
loeg 15 hours ago | parent
kristianp 14 hours ago | parent
anon373839 13 hours ago | parent
Schlagbohrer 4 hours ago | parent
rsfern 3 hours ago | parent
loeg 12 hours ago | parent
ProblemExplorer 15 hours ago | parent
The noncoding results on some reports grabbed my attention. Ember also looks like a particularly inexpensive option for some agent workflows.
On Artificial Analysis, Ember max scored 36 on the Intelligence Index at ~$0.14 per task, compared with 35 at $8 for Grok 4.7 xhigh, and 28 at $0.15 for GPT-6 Luna max. Haiku 5.5 max also scores 36, at $0.41 per task. These are AA's measured costs across its index for those specific configurations.
That puts Ember in roughly Grok's aggregate score range at about 1/55 of the measured cost, and ahead of Luna at a similar cost! [1]
The Vals finance/legal results are also particularly interesting: comparing Ember with GPT-6.1 Terra, both evaluated at "max" reasoning:
- Finance Agent v2.1: 63.83% vs 55.96%, at $0.06 vs $1.92 (!) per test. [2]
- Legal Research Bench: 49.04% vs 25.96%, at $0.06 vs $3.22 (!) per test. [3]
- HLAB-Vals-1.1: 25% vs 1.67%, at $0.12 vs $1.48 (!) per test. [4]
Those are INSANE score differences, at roughly 1/32, 1/54 and 1/12 of Terra's respective benchmark costs!
Misleadingly, their overall Vals Index scores are almost identical: 60.48% for Ember and 60.54% for Terra. Terra also scores higher on Vals' Terminal-Bench 4.0 run: 49.49% vs 39.39%. They arrive at similar aggregate scores through quite different strengths. [5][6]
For me, this reinforces the case for custom, workload specific evals. Broad benchmarks have been useful for shortlisting models but choosing between them, calls for representative tasks, explicit success criteria and measurements using the tools and reasoning settings you actually intend to deploy.
I certainly want to measure cost per successfully completed task, including retries and escalation.
Reusing a framework such as Harbor with a custom task suite seems increasingly useful here. [7] The aggregate score here gives me a starting point but the tasks I actually need done then determines my choice.
Goign by the generic benchmarks would confuse me to no end and likely burn me out.
Great times to be in!
[1] https://artificialanalysis.ai/leaderboards/models
[2] https://www.vals.ai/benchmarks/fabv2-1
[3] https://www.vals.ai/benchmarks/legal_research
[4] https://www.vals.ai/benchmarks/hlab
[5] https://www.vals.ai/models/meta_muse-ember
dvaplima 14 hours ago | parent
system2 15 hours ago | parent
If you want customers to switch over, you better make the price at least half of your competitor's.
mgdev 14 hours ago | parent
doodlesdev 12 hours ago | parent
> 1. All models run at max reasoning effort. Artificial Analysis results are from Intelligence Index v5, as published November 9, 2026; cost per task uses each model's list pricing. Internal results are from Meta's evaluation suite. The Personal Superintelligence Index (PSI) is an internal composite of eight evaluations: Agents' Last Exam, AutomationBench, FocusBench, JobBench, OfficeQA Pro, GDP.pdf, GDP.xlsx and VBT. Terminal-Bench 4.0 uses each model's best published harness: mini-swe-agent (Muse Ember), Claude Code (Claude Haiku 5.5), and Codex (GPT-6 Luna). OSWorld 2.1 uses partial-credit reward; PerceptionBench is scored with tools.sourcecodeplz 12 hours ago | parent
djacksondev 11 hours ago | parent
To me that is the main problem with Muse models whether it's Spark, Wonder or Ember. While it reads as frontier on benchmarks it really isn't.
This is evident when you compare Dots and Muse the products as well. The model quality is clearly still far behind.
DetroitThrow 9 hours ago | parent
alex0015 6 hours ago | parent
trvz 10 hours ago | parent
creativeSlumber 9 hours ago | parent
You can get deepseek v4.1 flash 1017 for cheaper than this from a US based ZDR provider via Openrouter.
sourcecodeplz 51 minutes ago | parent