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

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.

After some tweaks by the creator of this Twitch channel, the AI managed to halve its time to a still outrageous 406.5 hours. That is actually dead on half the time, which is interesting mathematically but still far too long to beat a game you can win with an overleveled Venusaur.

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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."

This, combined with the AI mistakenly thinking it was playing FireRed and LeafGreen and would need to find the Tea to progress, are part of the reasons it took so long to finish.

Honestly, AI just isn't very good at playing Pokemon. Someone else made Claude Plays Pokemon, and that AI spent hours trying to get out of Cerulean city because it kept jumping down a ledge to talk to an NPC it had already spoken to dozens of times.

So, these AIs aren't able to beat a game that we could when we barely knew our times tables. Let's not worry about them taking our jobs any time soon.

In the meantime, check out the best Pokemon games of all time.