News for hackers. Stuff that matters.
Re:Qwen3.8 is launching and going open-weight soon by cypressf on Monday July 20, 2026 @10:00AM (#48979002)
Here's what qwen 3.8 max preview generated when prompted with "create an svg of a pelican riding a bicycle"

https://cypressf.com/qwen38-pelican.svg

Notably it added a cheeky fish in the beak.

Re:Qwen3.8 is launching and going open-weight soon by simonw on Monday July 20, 2026 @11:02AM (#48979850)
Wow, that one is really good.
Re:Qwen3.8 is launching and going open-weight soon by Gormo on Monday July 20, 2026 @12:13PM (#48980867)
Apart from the fish being visible inside the pelican's mouth.
Re:Qwen3.8 is launching and going open-weight soon by winter_blue on Monday July 20, 2026 @02:00PM (#48982423)
And it's animated!
Re:Qwen3.8 is launching and going open-weight soon by simonw on Monday July 20, 2026 @03:45PM (#48983936)
What method did you use to generate that one?

I tried using their OpenAI-compatible API and got one that's a lot less fun (no animation) - https://tools.simonwillison.net/markdown-svg-renderer#url=ht...

Re:Qwen3.8 is launching and going open-weight soon by cypressf on Monday July 20, 2026 @10:15PM (#48987293)
I used the web UI at https://chat.qwen.ai/. I didn’t log in. I selected Qwen3.8-Max-Preview and prompted “create an SVG of a pelican riding a bicycle.”

It took a LOT of reasoning time before it spit it out. 10 min or more?

I wish I had created an account first because I lost the chain-of-thought that it used. I remember a couple highlights. There was an internal monologue about whether it was worth it to animate the legs and pedals, and a lot of repeated text about focusing on “a cohesive visual design.”

I don’t make svg art so I’m no expert, but I am also surprised at how small the resulting svg ended up. I expected LLM output to be more verbose, especially considering the animations.

I’m curious what happens if you retry a couple times. The nondeterminism might be strong enough to have highly variable outcomes.