Show HN: Jev Plays Pokémon Red

(jev-pokemon.vercel.app)

49 points | by pancomplex 6 hours ago

11 comments

  • stusmall 24 minutes ago
    This is so interesting to watch. For a couple minutes I was in awe of how quick and cheap it was. Then I saw just how bad the decision are and how it would get stuck in strange loops of going in and out of the same door to no end.

    This seems like a technology heading in the right direction but not quiet there yet. Excited for what they are cooking up but probably won't start building around it yet.

    • binlog 10 minutes ago
      This entire conversation around Jev seems weird to me. Like... we started from neural nets that could do basic decision making and classifications pretty well, then trained larger and larger language models to get to where we are now. Now suddenly everyone is going crazy because someone trained a smaller model that is adequate at making decisions? We already went through the "look this AI can play pokemon terribly" phase like a decade ago.
    • pancomplex 12 minutes ago
      Like others have mentioned in this post, I think a mix of models like Jev for simple stuff + a smarter reasoning model for more strategic thinking is the optimal solution. This experiment however is purely Jev. Which sometimes can be kinda dumb.
  • djhworld 4 minutes ago
    What's not clear to me on the video is whether jev is doing the button presses for controlling the character to move around.

    The "Jev calls" counter only seems to increment at junction points like battles, conversation prompts, menus etc.

    Is something else moving the character around?

    • pancomplex 0 minutes ago
      It's connected to the ROM of the actual game, so it can see a lot of things. It has multiple tools available, including being able to move to coordinates.

      All in the OSS repo if you wanna play around with it: https://github.com/christianmat/jev-pokemon

  • MitPitt 40 minutes ago
    This is kinda chill to have in the background. I wish there were livestreams showing live reasoning of top models which are currently trying to solve cancer or whatever. Imagine the pogs in chat when it does.
    • tehnoslow 31 minutes ago
      Actually, yes, that would be at least interesting
    • pancomplex 36 minutes ago
      People need to be live streaming their AI more!
  • stusmall 33 minutes ago
    >but not fast enough to play Doom yet sadly

    Did I miss something? I thought one of the demo videos was it doing pretty decent at the first level of Doom?

    • pancomplex 27 minutes ago
      In my experience it was too slow to do an FPS with 30 ticks per second reliably. It gets killed too fast.
  • lwarfield 41 minutes ago
    Looking at the diagram in the gh repo, it looks like this is entirely jev. Are there any examples of people having a big model like Fable handle high level goals?
    • SeanAnderson 14 minutes ago
      I'm not sure if you're asking about whether using Fable makes playing the game possible or if you're just curious about Jev + LLM interactions.

      However, https://x.com/TynanSylvester/status/2096965749369720970 Astra was able to beat RimWorld. So LLMs are definitely able to drive these sorts of games to completion with their current abilities.

    • pancomplex 28 minutes ago
      There frontier reasoning models do pretty well in Pokemon: https://github.com/benchflow-ai/pokemon-gym

      The interesting thing here imo is the cost and latency. So far we're at 4 badges for less than $0.5

    • staindk 29 minutes ago
      Hm wondering what a first pass optimal setup might be - jev for overworld navigation, escalate to sonnet for easy battles, opus for medium difficulty battles, and fable for gym bosses could probably have jev also manage all the escalation / de-escalation to different models.
  • rickintoplace 6 hours ago
    That's actually fun to watch. Did you experiment with nicknaming before you turned it off? I'd be a little curious to see how it behaves.
    • pancomplex 6 hours ago
      Jev can't come up with original text, but I did consider giving it a list of hilarious names.
      • JamesSwift 27 minutes ago
        Sure it can, just ask it for next char or "done" in a loop
        • pancomplex 6 minutes ago
          I just took your advice and added it to the list of Jev decisions. Watch it name its next Pokemon!
        • pancomplex 24 minutes ago
          True!
      • IanCal 26 minutes ago
        Maybe letter by letter spelling?
  • testaccount28 46 minutes ago
    with such a fat harness, this is more like watching a walk thru play the game.
    • laszlokorte 15 minutes ago
      Yeah I would have expected it to only decide which button to press, not something abstract like the choice of "go east to lavender town" for the goal of "in lavender town, climb the pokemon tower"
  • 361994752 40 minutes ago
    watched it stuck at rocket hideout for 10 mins.... let me check 1hr later to see if it can find a way out
    • jumploops 26 minutes ago
      It’s currently stuck at an elevator and deciding to teach Pokemon various TMs and HMs instead of progressing… pretty hilarious!
    • pancomplex 7 minutes ago
      it made it through!
  • theturtletalks 31 minutes ago
    Is Frigade going to use Jev to do object detection?
    • pancomplex 28 minutes ago
      Working on it :)
      • theturtletalks 23 minutes ago
        Nice. When I saw your connection to Frigade, I knew there was a connection haha
  • dmitrygr 28 minutes ago
    Considering it just made Charizard forget its only fire-type move "Ember" to learn "Counter", I note no signs of intelligence.
    • pancomplex 23 minutes ago
      Rookie mistake clearly..