Whiskey ♚

A pelican riding a bicycle through 20 different art styles. Not exactly what you'd expect from an AI coding demo. But that's what Baidu's newly launched ERNIE 5.5 Flash Preview created with The Pelican Test, a 116-second animated short brought to life using Python code written by the model. The same white pelican cycles through thousands of years of artistic styles, from prehistoric Saharan rock art and traditional Chinese stone rubbings to Javanese shadow puppetry, 8-bit pixel art, and even a modern AI code editor. And it's the little details that make this impressive. The scenes slide across the screen like film frames while the pelican keeps pedaling. In the Van Gogh-inspired Starry Night sequence, the swirling sky actually moves in sync with the bicycle. Even the soundtrack is carefully coordinated, with 22 selected audio recordings synchronized to the scene transitions using a model-written editing script. Some backgrounds were created using image-generation tools, but the animation itself shows how ERNIE can use code to coordinate visuals, motion, transitions, and sound into a complete creative experience. And its coding capabilities are showing up in benchmarks too. In the latest CodeArena: WebDev evaluation, ERNIE 5.5 Flash Preview scored 1,668 points, ranking #2 among open models and #4 among Chinese models, just behind larger Chinese models like Kimi K3.1 Pro and Qwen3.8-Max. The model packs 280B total parameters, 14B active per token, and a 1M-token context window. Its API is already available through Baidu's Qianfan platform, with model weights scheduled to be open-sourced before November 25. It's a pretty elaborate way to animate a bicycle-riding pelican. But it's also a clever demonstration of just how much creative work an AI coding model can bring together.