Show HN: Jev Plays Pokémon Red

Show HN: Jev Plays Pokémon Red(jev-pokemon.vercel.app)

82 points by pancomplex 7 hours ago | 41 comments

Hey HN! Wanted to share a fun project I've been hacking on. Given Jev can make decisions really fast (but not fast enough to play Doom yet sadly), I wanted to try and push it to play a more complex game than Tetris. So I went with Pokémon.

I've spent endless hours playing this game as a child so building this was a ton of fun.

I open sourced everything in case you want to hack on it yourself here: https://github.com/christianmat/jev-pokemon

The game is being streamed live including the tokens and cost - hopefully we get all the badges and don't get stuck in a cave :)

stusmall 1 hour 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 1 hour 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.

c7b 46 minutes ago | | |

A pre-trained universal classifier that can replace specifically-trained ones would have been considered just as much science fiction in the 2010's as the capabilities of modern LLMs. I'm not sure Jev is actually there yet, but at least it sounds theoretically doable today.

That being said, one thing having been unrealistic 10 years ago and just about possible today doesn't mean that it's going to change the world the same way another technically related, previously-impossible thing did. The Jev hype gives me a bit of the "you're still early to crypto" vibes of some later altcoins. I really like the idea, I think it's going to open up possibilities for using classifiers where we wouldn't or couldn't have trained one before. I'm crossing my fingers for an open weights version to drop. But it's still just a classifier, people have built similar things before Jev, the one thing that really stands out about it is their ability to generate hype.

ford 1 hour ago | | |

I agree it's overhyped, but the transition to a general purpose classifier (vs a narrow scope classifier) is new and noteworthy.

Ie the famous "Hotdog" clip from Silicon Valley [0]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ACmydtFDTGs

azan_ 1 hour ago | | |

Making decisions quickly, cheaply and without having to train your own model.

ralusek 52 minutes ago | |

The exact message I sent my friend this morning:

> the most interesting thing about this jev stuff

> is that people are seemingly like

> completely disinterested in how smart it actually is

> I haven't even heard it mentioned a single time how it actually compares to other LLMs coming up with their own classifications. Just: it's fast and cheap

After watching a few minutes of this it makes me think that maybe we should be a little more interested in how smart it is.

pancomplex 1 hour 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.

MitPitt 1 hour 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 1 hour ago | |

Actually, yes, that would be at least interesting

pancomplex 1 hour ago | |

People need to be live streaming their AI more!

testaccount28 2 hours ago |

with such a fat harness, this is more like watching a walk thru play the game.

laszlokorte 1 hour 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"

pancomplex 25 minutes ago | | |

That was how I first implemented it. Jev sadly never left Pallet Town.

rickintoplace 7 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 7 hours ago | |

Jev can't come up with original text, but I did consider giving it a list of hilarious names.

JamesSwift 1 hour ago | | |

Sure it can, just ask it for next char or "done" in a loop

IanCal 1 hour ago | | |

Maybe letter by letter spelling?

djhworld 1 hour 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 1 hour 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

lwarfield 1 hour 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?

pancomplex 1 hour ago | |

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

delichon 1 hour ago | |

A Robot is Sprinting Towards You: Do You Want it Running on Claude or Grok?

https://openrouter.ai/blog/insights/royale-last-agent-standi...

SeanAnderson 1 hour 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.

staindk 1 hour 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.

stusmall 1 hour 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 1 hour ago | |

In my experience it was too slow to do an FPS with 30 ticks per second reliably. It gets killed too fast.

zaik 38 minutes ago |

Seems like it got stuck on a Ghost enemy.

361994752 1 hour 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 1 hour ago | |

It’s currently stuck at an elevator and deciding to teach Pokemon various TMs and HMs instead of progressing… pretty hilarious!

pancomplex 1 hour ago | |

it made it through!

dmitrygr 1 hour ago |

Considering it just made Charizard forget its only fire-type move "Ember" to learn "Counter", I note no signs of intelligence.

pancomplex 1 hour ago | |

Rookie mistake clearly..

theturtletalks 1 hour ago |

Is Frigade going to use Jev to do object detection?

pancomplex 1 hour ago | |

Working on it :)

theturtletalks 1 hour ago | | |

Nice. When I saw your connection to Frigade, I knew there was a connection haha

avaer 1 hour ago |

I wish jev took in images so we could do this generically for any game, without memhacks. I'm sure that's coming.

You could front this with an image -> text model but that would be much lower quality vs latency, and the whole point of doing it with a decision model is remove the latency.

Games are a really interesting testing ground for robotics; if we can solve game playing (incl 3d) we could embody "system one" intelligence into robots that have something emulating general reflexes without needing to fine tune.

pancomplex 7 minutes ago | |

Agreed this would be super cool and I do see that coming in the future. But Jev-level latency just isn't there yet with full images.