Qwen3.6-35B-A3B on my laptop drew me a better pelican than Claude Opus 4.7

Simon Willison’s Weblog Subscribe Sponsored by: Teleport — Connect agents to your infra in seconds with Teleport Beams. Built-in identity. Zero secrets. Get early access Qwen3.6-35B-A3B on my laptop drew me a better pelican than Claude Opus 4.7 For anyone who has been taking my pelican riding a bicycle benchmark seriously as a robust way to test models, here are pelicans from this morning’s two big model releases—Qwen3.6-35B-A3B from Alibaba and Claude Opus 4.7 from Anthropic. Here’s the Qwen 3.6 pelican, generated using this 20.9GB Qwen3.6-35B-A3B-UD-Q4_K_S.gguf quantized model by Unsloth, running on my MacBook Pro M5 via LM Studio (and the llm-lmstudio plugin)—transcript here: And here’s one I got from Anthropic’s brand new Claude Opus 4.7 (transcript): I’m giving this one to Qwen 3.6. Opus managed to mess up the bicycle frame! I tried Opus a second time passing thinking_level: max. It didn’t do much better (transcript): I don’t think Qwen are cheating # A lot of people are convinced that the labs train for my stupid benchmark. I don’t think they do, but honestly this result did give me a little glint of suspicion. So I’m burning one of my secret backup tests—here’s what I got from Qwen3.6-35B-A3B and Opus 4.7 for “Generate an SVG of a flamingo riding a unicycle”: Qwen3.6-35B-A3B (transcript) Opus 4.7 (transcript) I’m giving this one to Qwen too, partly for the excellent <!-- Sunglasses on flamingo! --> SVG comment. What can we learn from this? # The pelican benchmark has always been meant as a joke—it’s mainly a statement on how obtuse and absurd the task of comparing these models is. The weird thing about that joke is that, for the most part, there has been a direct correlation between the quality of the pelicans produced and the general usefulness of the models. Those first pelicans from October 2024 were junk. The more recent entries have generally been much, much better—to the point that Gemini 3.1 Pro produces illustrations you could actually use somewhere, provided you had a pressing need to illustrate a pelican riding a bicycle. Today, even that loose connection to utility has been broken. I have enormous respect for Qwen, but I very much doubt that a 21GB quantized version of their latest model is more powerful or useful than Anthropic’s latest proprietary release. If the thing you need is an SVG illustration of a pelican riding a bicycle though, right now Qwen3.6-35B-A3B running on a laptop is a better bet than Opus 4.7! Posted 16th April 2026 at 5:16 pm · Follow me on Mastodon, Bluesky, Twitter or subscribe to my newsletter More recent articles Meta's new model is Muse Spark, and meta.ai chat has some interesting tools - 8th April 2026 Anthropic's Project Glasswing - restricting Claude Mythos to security researchers - sounds necessary to me - 7th April 2026 This is Qwen3.6-35B-A3B on my laptop drew me a better pelican than Claude Opus 4.7 by Simon Willison, posted on 16th April 2026. ai 1963 generative-ai 1742 local-llms 154 llms 1709 anthropic 269 claude 266 qwen 54 pelican-riding-a-bicycle 105 llm-release 191 lm-studio 19 Previous: Meta's new model is Muse Spark, and meta.ai chat has some interesting tools Monthly briefing Sponsor me for $10/month and get a curated email digest of the month's most important LLM developments. Pay me to send you less! Sponsor & subscribe Disclosures Colophon © 2002 2003 2004 2005 2006 2007 2008 2009 2010 2011 2012 2013 2014 2015 2016 2017 2018 2019 2020 2021 2022 2023 2024 2025 2026