Google’s costliest AI mannequin appears to have crossed a significant milestone: Beating a 29-year-old online game.
Last night time, Google CEO Sundar Pichai posted triumphantly on X, “What a end! Gemini 2.5 Pro simply accomplished Pokémon Blue!”
To be clear, the Gemini Plays Pokemon livestream was created by (in his personal phrases) “a 30 yr outdated software program engineer unaffiliated with Google” who goes by Joel Z. But Google executives have been cheering the hassle on.
For instance, Logan Kilpatrick, the product lead for Google AI Studio, posted final month that Gemini was “making nice progress at finishing Pokémon” and had “earned its fifth badge (subsequent greatest mannequin solely has 3 up to now, although with a special agent harness),” main Pichai to joke, “We are engaged on API, Artificial Pokémon Intelligence:)”
Why Pokémon? Back in February, Anthropic highlighted progress that its Claude AI fashions had been making in “Pokémon Red,” writing that Claude’s “prolonged considering and agent coaching” provides it “a significant enhance” on “extra surprising” duties, like taking part in a basic recreation. (“Pokémon Red” and “Blue” are completely different variations of a GameBoy title first launched in 1996 and tied to the long-running Pokémon franchise). There’s even a Claude Plays Pokemon Twitch channel that Joel Z cited as an inspiration.
Despite its progress, Claude doesn’t seem to have crushed “Pokémon Red” but. Does that imply Gemini is objectively higher on the recreation? On his Twitch web page, Joel Z urged viewers, “Please don’t think about this a benchmark for the way nicely an LLM can play Pokemon. You can’t actually make direct comparisons — Gemini and Claude have completely different instruments and obtain completely different info.”
And each AI fashions need assistance to play the sport — that’s the place the aforementioned agent harnesses are available in, offering the fashions with recreation screenshots overlaid with further info, permitting the mannequin to resolve the right way to reply (which can contain calling specialised brokers), after which urgent the button that corresponds with the AI’s instruction.
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Joel Z acknowledged that there have been different “dev interventions” to assist Gemini full the sport, however insisted that it’s not dishonest.
“My interventions enhance Gemini’s total decision-making and reasoning talents,” he says. “I don’t give particular hints — there aren’t any walkthroughs or direct directions for explicit challenges like Mt. Moon. The solely factor that comes even shut is letting Gemini know that it wants to speak to a Rocket Grunt twice to acquire the Lift Key, which was a bug that was later fastened in Pokemon Yellow.”
Plus, he mentioned, “Gemini Plays Pokémon continues to be actively being developed, and the framework continues to evolve.”
