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

1 points by pancomplex ↗ HN
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 :)

110 comments

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rickintoplace
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.
testaccount28
with such a fat harness, this is more like watching a walk thru play the game.
laszlokorte
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
That was how I first implemented it. Jev sadly never left Pallet Town.
pancomplex
Fair point, but I’d challenge anyone to build an ai or hard coded engine that, even following a walkthrough, completes the entire game for under $2 in tokens
lwarfield
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
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.

MitPitt
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.
someothherguyy
then it would cost human lives, no more fun i made this thing with no real effort vibes
361994752
watched it stuck at rocket hideout for 10 mins.... let me check 1hr later to see if it can find a way out
jumploops
It’s currently stuck at an elevator and deciding to teach Pokemon various TMs and HMs instead of progressing… pretty hilarious!
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stusmall
>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?

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

pancomplex
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.
JamesSwift
Well in a lot of ways this demo actually is a mix of jev for simple stuff + a very intelligent harness to fill in the rest. Pay attention to the "jev counter" on when api calls actually happen and the kinds of decisions its making. Its very rarely in a tight loop, and when it is (eg in an item menu) it tends to randomly walk through options.

Its very cool, but the harness is doing a _ton_ of heavy lifting.

stusmall
Oh I want to be clear, I don't want my post to come off as negative. I really do mean things are headed the right direction and I think this harness is super cool. So don't take it that way and thank you for bringing something cool into this world.
binlog
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
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.

someothherguyy
> but at least it sounds theoretically doable today

why

thornewolf
We have a bad universal classifier now (via Jev). 0->1, one might say.

A bad universal classifier does suggest a good one later. And that is exactly what I would call "theoretically doable"

That said, I don't think that Jev is a magic breakthrough or anything. I think it is just a particularly good narrative with an easy way to try it out.

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lukev
Jev is interesting in that it's much cheaper and faster than a frontier LLM.

But I've seen nothing to indicate that the upper bound on classification tasks of a Jev-like model can exceed a frontier LLM with reasoning tokens. That seems nearly impossible even in principle (since Jev-style models are still based on LLM pretraining).

So while they're definitely on the Pareto frontier, which is valuable, they're at the "cheap" end of the spectrum more than the "good" end and I don't expect that to change.

c7b
LLMs are like lossy compression of ~all of written text ever produced, with useful recall. To the extent that the corpus contains labelled examples of the given classification task, it's not unreasonable to think that we'll be able to build a decoder for that, just like we already have a useful decoder for next-token prediction. Extend to image classification the same way we already have multimodal LLMs.
daveguy
> 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's the point. It can't. And it's not even close.

osener
It is impressive, but all the hype and fake demos are selling it as a model that is as smart as frontier reasoning LLMs in the decisions it makes yet much cheaper and much faster, which is not true.
pancomplex
Nothing fake here and fully open source if you wanna take a peek. It does make a bunch of mistakes, often. But it eventually recovers!

https://github.com/christianmat/jev-pokemon

tehsauce
For those curious how it works, it’s essentially a script that plays the game but uses jev as a source of rng to make it stochastic
Jach
Yeah, there's a lot hard-coded into the typescript files that make this much less impressive than the other "AI plays" versions that have come and gone that play with less help. A Claude one that only used screenshots would always get stuck in the rocket hideout...
Leynos
Does dropping a prng in place of Jev produce similar results?
osener
For the record I did not mean to say that about your work, nice job.
gchamonlive
I think that misses the point of Jev being ridiculously efficient while maintaining adequate intelligence for automation tasks. We have to train our minds to filter out branding and marketing.
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gchamonlive
For what it does, it classifies, orchestrates, operates and delegates tasks exceedingly well for its size and weight. It's ridiculously cheap and efficient, but if you can only see progress in terms of raw cognitive power then you'll surely miss how interesting this is.
solidasparagus
The cheap, fast and smart-enough LLM space has been wildly neglected. Jev is one of the few players truly targeting that space. And for a lot of people it is the first time they are asking "what could I build if llms were interaction-speed fast?". The answers are cool, the problem is that Jev is not, I think, smart-enough yet to have that many applications, but it's smart enough that you can start to see what they will look like.
michaelchisari
Performance and efficiency have been neglected for years as everyone threw every available GPU and trillions of dollars trying (and failing) to create AGI. And the results have been impressive.

But good enough for pennies in an instant is more useful.

aurareturn
Yea but this model wasn’t trained to play Pokémon but it can. It’s general.
daveguy
So is a random number generator. That doesn't mean it can play Pokemon.
mtford
This happens all the time in tech. A few years ago everybody got excited about static websites and server-side rendering as if we hadn't been doing that with PHP long ago.
Garlef
The difference is that you don't need training here; The decision graphs can be built on the fly by an LLM and contain instructions in plain language.

The magic moment for me from the Jev release was not that there was some system playing doom: Rather it was the moment, they just changed a part of the prompt to "don't shoot, just dodge" and the behavior changed immediately.

This means you can have a system with fast decision-making but still interact with it via language.

catlifeonmars
[delayed]
Garlef
True - in the long run. But that's quite expensive. And you'd need a bigger org to even support this.

They even named the model after "Jevons Paradoxon" - They anticipate that their model lowers the cost of adopting this kind of AI significantly, unlocking a lot of use cases.

sky2224
The difference to me is that the models from a decade ago would need to be trained to play the game. As far as I'm aware, Jev has had zero specific training or fine-tuning to play the game. It's simply told, "Hey, here are the rules. Play." That's it.

I work in manufacturing. I think this will be fantastic for stuff like SPC.

ralusek
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.

stusmall
There is a lot of room for a lot of different models. For many use cases, intelligence beats out all.

For me in my day job, having extremely fast low quality decision makers over noisy inputs is very valuable. I work in security and having something that can help triage alerts, classify items and group things together is extremely valuable. It doesn't need to be perfect. Just being able to take a set of inputs from deterministic tooling and to be make general priority classifications goes a long way on helping humans look at the most important items first.

refactor_master
Why not spend a few tokens or so on making a frontier LLM build the classifier from scratch? Then you also know exactly what the classifier is capable of, and whether it’s easily learnable/informative data.

Why would you be confident in feeding garbage to a “cheap and fast” classifier with unknown domain-specific performance?

I know we kind assume omniscience for frontier models, but at this point the evidence is kind of out there.

johnsmith1840
They know it's not. The company actually has or had public statements that they didn't like public benchmarks for comparison.

My main wonder is the difference between it and having a small llm no thinking output a single number only as a choice. Isn't that nearly the same here?

raincole
Because it's not that smart especially when you compare it to other LLMs. The top LLMs have completely change the baseline of being smart.
hbrn
You gotta admit that turning "our model is very dumb and can only make simple decisions" into "System One Model" is a pretty clever marketing move.
jbjbjbjb
Jev is for single shot classification, not multi-step RL environments with delayed reward and explore/exploit. My guess is it would go through the door with high confidence every time unless you change the input to add the history.
pancomplex
This runs entirely on Jev as the only AI with a typescript harness that feeds it selective context.
Garlef
I think the people behind jev made their intended use clear by labeling as "system one" - so they anticipate that there's a slower "system two" mediating jev
mitxela
feels like pre-LLM AI playing a video game but more expensive
djhworld
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?

avaer
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
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.
zaik
Seems like it got stuck on a Ghost enemy.
hummusFiend
Great work!

Super cool to see it do the whole game. I spent my fable budget building something similar this week but only drove it to Brock. I like the "current focus" framing too.

pancomplex
Thank you! And interesting data point on Fable burning out on tokens so early.
ac2u
Cool project, comes with a little too much guidance in the harness though IMO (pathfinding, textual milestones etc). (The author is very upfront about this in their README though)

I think if it was combined with a regular vLLM it could be really interesting, especially watching the reasoning logs.

Bonus points if it was one of the latest open models that somehow had all prior training knowledge of Pokemon abliterated so it was reasoning as an intelligent persona that had no knowledge of even the concept of Pokemon.

budoso
I also tried to create a “Jev plays Pokémon” but with minimal additional context outside a move history and what is available in memory from the emulator, so no pathfinder, predetermined game path, etc. I can safely say that this experiment failed however, and Jev was not able to even get to Professor Oak’s lab to get a starter.

Props to OP for getting a working version, but it does not seem that this model is capable enough to play Pokémon at this point in time.

pancomplex
Thank you. What I realized is that Jev is incredibly powerful for the decision making part of it when presented with a scenario that gives it a little context. It looks like we’re gonna be able to beat this game for under $2 of tokens. This is what blows my mind
flockonus
The decisions are quick, but look good as random w/ tons of back and forth. Are you at least feeding back some of its previous decisions on to state?
iugtmkbdfil834
Only watched for a few minutes, but it did seem to backtrack a lot.
ViscountPenguin
The choices Jev has here feel very railroady, it seems like something very significantly dumber could beat the game with these options.
pancomplex
I challenge you to fork the repo and solve it faster using less tokens/cost than Jev :)
dochaus
He confirms what I long suspected, all you need is to cheese Charizard and flamethrower
bulatb
Koga's guy tells Jev that "strength is not the key for Pokemon, it's strategy."

Jev then wipes the whole gym with a single overleveled Charizard.

Fitting and appropriate on many levels.

rubicon33
Pretty awesome! Just curious are you vibe coding this?
sync1117
i need to come up with something more creative and interesting than video games as benchmarks
DylanMerigaud
Struggles with loops show complexity isn't fully mastered yet.
singularity2001
Jev is dumb a rock, so it's basically just a random selection of a smart model's suggested plans?