Simon Willison Tests Granite 4.1 3B LLM for SVG Generation
Simon Willison experimented with the Granite 4.1 3B language model, released by IBM under Apache 2.0 license, to generate an SVG of a pelican riding a bicycle. He used 21 GGUF quantized variants from Unsloth, ranging from 1.2GB to 6.34GB, totaling 51.3GB. The results were uniformly poor, with no correlation between model size and output quality. Willison plans to retry with a model better at drawing pelicans. The post was published on May 4, 2026.
Key facts
- IBM released Granite 4.1 family of LLMs under Apache 2.0 license.
- Granite 4.1 comes in 3B, 8B, and 30B sizes.
- Unsloth released 21 GGUF quantized variants of the 3B model.
- Model files range from 1.2GB to 6.34GB.
- Total size of all 21 files is 51.3GB.
- Willison prompted 'Generate an SVG of a pelican riding a bicycle'.
- No distinguishable pattern between quality and model size.
- Post was published on May 4, 2026.
Entities
Artists
- Simon Willison
Institutions
- IBM
- Unsloth