The frankly terrifying rise of AI would be enough to convince anyone that a robot takeover is imminent, but one large language model's attempts to play through Pokemon Red have reassured me that it might still be a ways off yet.
Over on Twitch, Claude Plays Pokemon (Claude being the name of the AI, which was developed by Anthropic) has been wandering through Pokemon Red for the last 22 hours, and the end is nowhere in sight. With a badge in hand, a Squirtle named Shell, a Nidoran named Spike, a Pikachu called Bolt, and a Spearow dubbed Swift, Claude has only recently made its way out of Pewter City after spending a bit too long repeatedly walking into the fence at the side of Brock's gym.
According to the channel description on Twitch, this latest version of Claude (3.7 Sonnet, to be exact) previously got past Lt. Surge's gym, which is quite a feat when you consider that even humans tend to struggle with his frustrating trash can puzzle. It's progress that only this version of Claude has managed to make, which makes sense as developer Anthropic's prior attempts at the same project found that "previous models wandered aimlessly or got stuck in loops."
This seems to be a different run which obviously hasn't got that far as Lt. Surge yet, but it's clearly got the capability to do so, despite the fact that Claude "has no special training for Pokemon – it's using its general reasoning abilities to navigate the world."
As for how it all works, Claude tries to work out what's happening by analyzing screenshots of the game – it uses "a pathfinding tool" to spot paths, helping it find its bearings. On top of that, it also "maintains a dynamic set of notes" of information from everything about the mechanics of the game to the Pokemon themselves, and has access to some parts of the game's memory to check things like the status of its party.
But, as you've probably gathered by this point, progress is rather slow. You can actually watch the AI's reasoning for each decision it makes to see how it processes the information, including its, uh, feelings? "This is concerning!" it declares as a Caterpie knocks Bolt the Pikachu to 1HP. Despite accumulating notes, the AI sometimes appears to forget things, including what it's just done – this was seen in full force when it was trying to navigate away from Pewter City gym, but kept looping its actions and getting stuck by the fence.
To watch it without the AI's thought process running, the whole thing feels very similar to Twitch Plays Pokemon, which is rather funny when you consider that, at times, there were over 121,000 people simultaneously trying to control the same game (with many deliberately trying to halt progress, at that). They say two brains are better than one, but can thousands be better than one AI model? I'd like to think so, and hey, if Claude takes longer than 16 days to see this through, I'd say the collective hive mind of Twitch circa 2014 wins.
Be sure to check out our ranking of the best Pokemon games for more of the best RPGs.
