Debates over AI benchmarking have reached Pokémon

Not even Pokémon is safe from AI benchmarking controversy. Last week, a post on X went viral, claiming that Google’s latest Gemini model surpassed Anthropic’s flagship Claude model in the original Pokémon video game trilogy. Reportedly, Gemini had reached Lavendar Town in a developer’s Twitch stream; Claude was stuck at Mount Moon as of late February. But what the post failed to mention is that Gemini had an advantage. As users on Reddit pointed out, the developer who maintains the Gemini stream built a custom minimap that helps the model identify “tiles” in the game like cuttable trees. This reduces the need for Gemini to analyze screenshots before it makes gameplay decisions. Now, Pokémon is a semi-serious AI benchmark at best — few would argue it’s a very informative test of a model’s capabilities. But it is an instructive example of how different implementations of a benchmark can influence the results. For example, Anthropic reported two scores for its recent Anthropic 3.7 So ... Read full article.