Aug 04, 2026 19:00:00

A benchmark test has been proposed to 'have AI create a 3D world of The Lord of the Rings.'

Andrei Karpathy, co-founder of OpenAI, has proposed a benchmark test in which 'AI generates a 3D world of The Lord of the Rings.'

We're starting to leave the territory where you'd test an LLM by eg 'create an svg of pelican on a bicycle'. As one idea to generalize it, I was interested what Opus 5 would do if I gave it the first paragraph of the Lord of the Rings, a 1M token budget (~$10) and asked for… pic.twitter.com/ybIpXhYSsj
— Andrej Karpathy (@karpathy) August 2, 2026

Mr. Karpathy instructed Claude Opus 5 to build a 3D world using three.js while inputting 'the first paragraph of The Lord of the Rings.' When tested with a maximum of 1 million tokens, Claude Opus 5 took approximately 2 hours to output 5500 lines of code.

The 3D world created by Claude Opus 5 can be viewed at the following link. It is a 3D animation that recreates the opening of The Lord of the Rings. The audio was generated by Mr. Karpathy using ElevenLabs ' AI and is not a result of Claude's work.

A Long-Expected Party
https://karpathy.ai/lotr-movie/

Bilbo Baggins' Bag End.

People attend Bilbo's farewell feast.

A cave filled with treasure. While it can't compare to works created by hand over many hours, it's surprisingly high quality considering it was completed by AI in just two hours.

Karpathy said he created the 'test to have AI create a 3D world of The Lord of the Rings' after being inspired by the 'Pelican on a Bicycle Test.'

More on the pelican on the bicycle test from @simonw : https://t.co/OXmtODyTKj

I uploaded the source here so it's playable in the browser, forkable etc. https://t.co/w3Nctc888d

Look out for GTA Hobbiton dropping before GTA VI :)
— Andrej Karpathy (@karpathy) August 2, 2026

The 'Pelican Test' is a benchmark test devised by AI expert Simon Willison, instructing an AI model to create an SVG image of a pelican riding a bicycle. In 2024, when GPT-4o and Claude 3.5 Sonnet were still in use, even rendering a pelican or bicycle was difficult.

Here's what happens when you try a benchmark using GPT-4o and Google Gemini to draw a 'pelican riding a bicycle' in SVG format - GIGAZINE

With subsequent advancements in AI, the ability to render SVG images of 'pelicans riding bicycles' has also improved, and the most advanced models at the time of writing this article can now generate illustrations that are quite close to ideal.

This is what happens when you have the Gemini 3.1 Pro and Qwen3.6-35B-A3B perform the AI benchmark 'Draw a pelican riding a bicycle' - GIGAZINE