Google AI is worse at Pokemon than I was when I was 5 – taking 800 hours to beat the Elite 4 and having a breakdown when its HP got low

Psyduck looking stressed next to Misty
(Image credit: The Pokemon Company)

If you're someone who thinks AI is almost ready to take over the world, I have some good or bad (depending on your stance on things) news for you: Google's Gemini 2.5 Pro took over 800 hours to beat the 29-year-old children's game Pokemon Blue.

There's a Twitch account called Gemini_Plays_Pokemon, a pale imitation of the incredible Twitch Plays Pokemon account that started this trend. First things first: how long did it take the AI to actually complete the game? Well, it was a staggering 813 hours. I feel like you could hit buttons randomly and beat the game faster than that.

Additionally, as spotted by our friends at PC Gamer, Google DeepMind reported on the Twitch account, and something unusual happens whenever its Pokemon get low on health or power points (PP). Whenever one or both of these conditions are met, "model performance appears to correlate with a qualitatively observable degradation in the model’s reasoning capability – for instance, completely forgetting to use the pathfinder tool in stretches of gameplay while this condition persists."

Issy van der Velde
Contributor

I'm Issy, a freelancer who you'll now occasionally see over here covering news on GamesRadar. I've always had a passion for playing games, but I learned how to write about them while doing my Film and TV degrees at the University of Warwick and contributing to the student paper, The Boar. After university I worked at TheGamer before heading up the news section at Dot Esports. Now you'll find me freelancing for Rolling Stone, NME, Inverse, and many more places. I love all things horror, narrative-driven, and indie, and I mainly play on my PS5. I'm currently clearing my backlog and loving Dishonored 2.

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