✳flâneur — a map of the web's best reading

Insights into Claude Opus 4.5 from Pokémon — LessWrong

lesswrong.com · 5,576 words · saved by 1 readers

You may be surprised to learn that ClaudePlaysPokemon is still running today, and that Claude still hasn't beaten Pokémon Red, more than half a year after Google proudly announced that Gemini 2.5 Pro beat Pokémon Blue. Indeed, since then, Google and OpenAI models have gone on to beat the longer and more complex Pokémon Crystal, yet Claude has made no real progress on Red since Claude 3.7 Sonnet![1] This is because ClaudePlaysPokemon is a purer test of LLM ability, thanks to its consistently simple agent harness[2] and the relatively hands-off approach of its creator, David Hershey of Anthropic.[3] When Claudes repeatedly hit brick walls in the form of the Team Rocket Hideout and Erika's Gym for months on end, nothing substantial was done to give Claude a leg up. But Claude Opus 4.5 has finally broken through those walls, in a way that perhaps validates the chatter that Opus 4.5 is a substantial advancement. Though, hardly AGI-heralding, as will become clear. What follows are notes on h

x Insights into Claude Opus 4.5 from Pokémon — LessWrong Language Models (LLMs) AI Curated 2025 Top Fifty: 14 % 223 Insights into Claude Opus 4.5 from Pokémon by Julian Bradshaw 9th Dec 2025 12 min read 24 223 Credit: Nano Banana, with some text provided. You may be surprised to learn that ClaudePlaysPokemon is still running today, and that Claude still hasn't beaten Pokémon Red, more than half a year after Google proudly announced that Gemini 2.5 Pro beat Pokémon Blue. Indeed, since then, Google and OpenAI models have gone on to beat the longer and more complex Pokémon Crystal , yet Claude ha

Explore this link on the map →

related reading