Google’s Gemini has beaten Pokémon Blue (with a little help)

Google’s most expensive AI model seems to have crossed a major milestone: Beating a 29-year-old video game. Last night, Google CEO Sundar Pichai posted triumphantly on X, “What a finish! Gemini 2.5 Pro just completed Pokémon Blue!” To be clear, the Gemini Plays Pokemon livestream was created by (in his own words) “a 30 year old software engineer unaffiliated with Google” who goes by Joel Z. But Google executives have been cheering the effort on. For example, Logan Kilpatrick, the product lead for Google AI Studio, posted last month that Gemini was “making great progress at completing Pokémon” and had “earned its 5th badge (next best model only has 3 so far, though with a different agent harness),” leading Pichai to joke, “We are working on API, Artificial Pokémon Intelligence:)” Why Pokémon? Back in February, Anthropic highlighted progress that its Claude AI models were making in “Pokémon Red,” writing that Claude’s “extended thinking and agent training” gives it “a major boost” on ... Read full article.