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On Tuesday good afternoon , Anthropic launchedClaude Plays Pokémonon Twitch , a livestream of Anthropic ’s new AI fashion model , Claude 3.7 Sonnet , playing a game of Pokémon Red . It ’s become a fascinating experiment of sorts , showcasing the capability of today ’s AI technical school and people ’s reactions to them .
AI investigator have used all sorting ofvideo game , fromStreet FightertoPictionary , to try out young models — often more for amusement than utility . But Anthropic said that Pokémon examine to be a useful benchmark for Claude 3.7 Sonnet , which can effectively“think”through the form of puzzles the game hold in .
Like OpenAI’so3 - miniand DeepSeek’sR1 , Claude 3.7 Sonnet can “ reason ” its room through toughened challenge , like playing a video game designed for children . While the example ’s non - reasoning predecessor , Claude 3.5 Sonnet , failed the very beginning of Pokémon Red — exit the player ’s home in Pallet Town — Claude 3.7 Sonnet manage to win three gym leader badge .
The fresh Claude still runs into difficulty , though . hr into the Twitch stream , the model was deter by a rock’n’roll wall , which it could n’t walk through no matter how firmly it tried .
One Twitch user summed up the situation this path : “ who would win , a computer AI with thousands of time of day put into programming it , or 1 rock wall ? ”
finally , Claude realized that it could voyage around the bulwark .
On the one hand , it ’s frustrative to watch Claude traverse Pokémon Red with the amphetamine of aSlowpoke , reasoning through each and every step with harrowing contemplation . Yet it ’s also peculiarly compelling . The left of the flow shows Claude ’s “ think process , ” while the right shows genuine - time gameplay .
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At one spot , Claude attempt to place Professor Oak inside his lab , but got confused , because there were other NPCs in the scene .
“ I remark a new case has appeared below me — a role with black pilus and what looks like a white coat at coordinates ( 2 , 10 ) , ” Claude wrote . “ This might be Professor Oak ! get me go down and tattle to him . ”
Claude then proceeded to erroneously babble out to an NPC other than the Professor — an NPC the theoretical account had spoken with several time before . Some of the thousand - rum people in the Twitch chat started to get itchy . Others , in particular those who ’d been see the stream for more than a few minute , were less worried .
“ guy wire cool down , ” one person write in the chat . “ Before we go out and entered Oak ’s lab like 10 meter before understanding how to move on . ”
For longtime Twitch users , the data format of Anthropic ’s stream might sense nostalgic . Over a decade ago , millions of hoi polloi endeavor to play Pokémon Red at once in a first - of - its - sort online societal experiment calledTwitch Plays Pokémon . Each user could contain the player character via Twitch schmooze , resulting in predictably disorderly gameplay .
Some AI researchers have cited Twitch Plays Pokémon as an inspiration for their piece of work . In October 2023 , Seattle - base software engineer Peter Whidden published a YouTube video detailing how he train a reinforcement learning algorithm to trifle Pokémon . His AI spent over50,000 time of day playing the gamebefore it learn to successfully navigate it . One challenge was that the AI preferred to admire the pixelated scene rather of in reality work the game .
AI - powered “ reenactment ” of Twitch Plays Pokémon like Whidden ’s and Anthropic ’s are entertaining , but a small American bittersweet at the same meter . The original current was such a pivotal moment in Twitch chronicle because it brought people together in an unexpected way . Everyone was on the same squad , working toward the goal of getting the actor character to stop function in circle and in reality progress through the game .
In 2025 , it seems we ’re no longer mate , but spectators , keep an eye on an AI modeling attempt to play a game many of us make the hang of when we were five years old . It ’s an AI - prompt microcosm of a larger trend : Our experiences online are motivate from shared , communal activities to more lonely ones .
