[lanewinfield]

hi, I made this. thank you for posting.

I love clocks and I love finding the edges of what any given technology is capable of.

I've watched this for many hours and Kimi frequently gets the most accurate clock but also the least variation and is most boring. Qwen is often times the most insane and makes me laugh. Which one is "better?"

[jdietrich]

Clock drawing is widely used as a test for assessing dementia. Sometimes the LLMs fail in ways that are fairly predictable if you're familiar with CSS and typical shortcomings of LLMs, but sometimes they fail in ways that are less obvious from a technical perspective but are exactly the same failure modes as cognitively-impaired humans.

I think you might have stumbled upon something surprisingly profound.

https://www.psychdb.com/cognitive-testing/clock-drawing-test

[overfeed]

> Clock drawing is widely used as a test for assessing dementia

Interestingly, clocks are also an easy tell for when you're dreaming, if you're a lucid dreamer; they never work normally in dreams.

[xrisk]

Maybe explainable via the fact that these tests are part of the LLM training set?

[jorgesborges]

Conceptual deficit is a great failure mode description. The inability to retrieve "meaning" about the clock -- having some understanding about its shape and function but not its intent to convey time to us -- is familiar with a lot of bad LLM output.

[BHSPitMonkey]

I would think the way humans draw clocks has more in common with image generation models (which probably do a bit better with this task overall) than a language model producing SVG markup, though.

[ACCount37]

LLMs don't do this because they have "people with dementia draw clocks that way" in their data. They do it because they're similar enough to human minds in function that they often fail in similar ways.

An amusing pattern that dates back to "1kg of steel is heavier of course" in GPT-3.5.

[TheJoeMan]

Figure 6 with the square clock would be a cool modern art piece.

[bspammer]

If you're keeping all the generated clocks in a database, I'd love to see a Facemash style spin-off website where users pick the best clock between two options, with a leaderboard. I want to know what the best clock Qwen ever made was!

[abixb]

We might be on to creating a new crowd-ranked LLM benchmark here.

[nightpool]

Yes! Please do this

[layer8]

Not the best, but the most amusing.

[smusamashah]

Please make it show last 5 (or some other number) of clocks for each model. It will be nice to see the deviation and variety for each model at a glance.

[charliewallace]

Very cool! I also love clocks, especially weird ones, and recently put up this 3D Moebius Strip clock, hope you like it: https://www.mobiusclock.com

[chemotaxis]

This is honestly the best thing I've seen on HN this month. It's stupid, enlightening... funny and profound and the same time. I have a strong temptation to pick some of these designs and build them in real life.

I applaud you for spending money to get it done.

[AnonHP]

Could you please change and adjust the positions of the titles (like GPT 5)? On Firefox Focus on iOS, the spacing is inconsistent (seems like it moves due to the space taken by the clock). After one or two of them, I had to scroll all the way down to the bottom and come back up to understand which title is linked to which clock.

[anigbrowl]

I really like this. The broken ones are sometimes just failures, but sometimes provide intriguing new design ideas.

[jdiff]

This same principle is why my favorite image generation model is the earlier models from 2019-2020 where they could only reliably generate soup. It's like Rorschach tests, it's not about what's there, it's about what you see in them. I don't want a bot to make art for me, sometimes I just want some shroom-induced inspirational smears.

[ks2048]

Nice job! Maybe let users click an example to see the raw source (LLM output)

[brianjking]

This is an awesome benchmark. Officially one of my favorites now. Thank you for making this.

[csours]

LOVE IT!

It would be really cool if I could zoom out and have everything scale properly!

[Fabricio20]

Why is this different per user? I sent this to a few friends and they all see different things from what i'm seeing, for the same time..?

[samtheprogram]

It regenerates on page load. I find that pretty useful.

Grok 4 and Kimi nailed it the first time for me, then only Kimi on the second pass.

[layer8]

It’s different per minute, not per user.

[hakcermani]

.. would you mind sharing the prompt .. in a gist perhaps .

[ceroxylon]

They have it available on the site under the (?) button:

"Create HTML/CSS of an analog clock showing ${time}. Include numbers (or numerals) if you wish, and have a CSS animated second hand. Make it responsive and use a white background. Return ONLY the HTML/CSS code with no markdown formatting."