One of the World's Most Advanced AI Agents Is Completely Stuck Trying to Beat a Pokémon Game for Children

In case you haven't heard, Anthropic has been livestreaming its AI model, Claude 3.7 Sonnet, attempting to complete a playthrough of Pokémon Red. The experiment, dubbed "Claude Plays Pokémon," is intended to be a demonstration of "AI agents," the industry's ongoing race to create AI models that are capable of operating autonomously by interacting with their environment. Claude has managed to get surprisingly far into the game, clinching three Gym badges and reaching, as of this week, Cerulean City. But it plods along at a painstakingly slow pace, stopping to "think" after every single move, sometimes for longer intervals than others. For nearly 80 agonizing hours, for instance, Claude bumbled cluelessly around Mt. Moon, before finally finding the ladder it needed to escape. Invested Twitch viewers breathed a sigh of relief. Progress isn't looking poised to speed up. The Anthropic AI's excursion through the Kanto region has mostly devolved into running around in circles, unsure of it ... Read full article.