Alphabet Inc. Goog googl chief executive officer Sundal Pichai After the company’s Gemini 2.5 Pro model clears the fifth gym badge in the classic Game Boy title “Pokémon Red,” he is jokingly promoting a new kind of “API” that he calls artificial Pokemon Intelligence.
what happened: “We’re working on APIs, artificial Pokemon Intelligence,” Pichai wrote to X, citing a progress report from Google AI product Lead Logan Kilpatrick.
Kilpatrick’s post shows the timeline chart where Gemini ran the game. From his first rival fight in “Pallet Town” to his insistence on “Soul Badge” about 500 hours later. “I just won the fifth badge. There are only three of the next best models so far,” he said, with Gemini working with an “agent harness” that feeds screen pixels and buttons, which return to the language model for long-story planning.
The playful benchmark arrived a few weeks after rival humanity boasted that its Claude 3.7 sonnet model defeated three gym leaders using a similar setup designed to test extended inference. Humanity called Pokemon is called “toy benchmarks,” but the game’s puzzles say it revealed that AI can learn goals, navigate the maze and manage limited resources with tens of thousands of actions.
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Google’s internal scorecard goes further. The line graph of Kilpatrick’s tweets lists more than two dozen milestones, from hooking up a Pokéflute to defeating a hideout in Team Rocket.
While neither company claims that “catching everything” solves real-world problems, AI Arms races reveal a broader push to “agent” AI that can run software, explore virtual environments and ultimately automate complex digital chores.
Why is it important: Not too many tongues on social media or funny posts, Pichai likes to stand up to Gemini critics whenever she feels she needs to intervene. CEO Sundal Pichai said China’s deepsec is a fast-moving rival, but confirmed that Google’s Gemini is still earning performances.
Later pushed onto revenue plans, he told analysts that models began as free and paid tiers, but that ads would “probably” tiered over time. In short, Gemini is technically ahead of the board for now, and Google expects to narrow it down through both subscriptions and future ad integrations.
Images via ShutterStock
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