No longer even Pokémon is protected from AI benchmarking controversy.
Closing week, a put up on X went viral, claiming that Google’s newest Gemini fashion surpassed Anthropic’s flagship Claude fashion within the authentic Pokémon online game trilogy. Reportedly, Gemini had reached Lavender The town in a developer’s Twitch circulate; Claude was once caught at Mount Moon nowadays February.
Gemini is actually forward of Claude atm in pokemon after achieving Lavender The town
119 reside perspectives best btw, extremely underrated circulate %.twitter.com/8AvSovAI4x
— Jush (@Jush21e8) April 10, 2025
However what the put up failed to say is that Gemini had a bonus.
As customers on Reddit identified, the developer who maintains the Gemini circulate constructed a customized minimap that is helping the fashion establish “tiles” within the sport like cuttable timber. This reduces the will for Gemini to investigate screenshots sooner than it makes gameplay choices.
Now, Pokémon is a semi-serious AI benchmark at absolute best — few would argue it’s an overly informative take a look at of a fashion’s features. But it surely is an instructive instance of the way other implementations of a benchmark can affect the effects.
For instance, Anthropic reported two rankings for its contemporary Anthropic 3.7 Sonnet fashion at the benchmark SWE-bench Verified, which is designed to guage a fashion’s coding talents. Claude 3.7 Sonnet completed 62.3% accuracy on SWE-bench Verified, however 70.3% with a “customized scaffold” that Anthropic evolved.
Extra not too long ago, Meta fine-tuned a model of considered one of its more moderen fashions, Llama 4 Maverick, to accomplish smartly on a specific benchmark, LM Enviornment. The vanilla model of the fashion rankings considerably worse at the similar analysis.
For the reason that AI benchmarks — Pokémon integrated — are imperfect measures to start with, customized and non-standard implementations threaten to muddy the waters even additional. This is to mention, it doesn’t appear most likely that it’ll get any more uncomplicated to match fashions as they’re launched.
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