Anthropic shares timelapse video of Claude Fable 5 AI vision model beating Pokemon FireRed

Soon gamers will be able to have AI agents play video games for them instead of having fun.

Anthropic launched its new Claude Fable 5 AI model for general public use today, and included a timelapse video of it beating Pokémon FireRed. Take a look.

Here's what Anthropic had to say about its Fable 5 vision AI model demo:

Fable 5 is the new state-of-the-art model for tasks involving vision. It can extract precise numbers from detailed scientific figures and can perform complex vision-based tasks like rebuilding a web app’s source code from screenshots alone. It also needs less scaffolding: for example, previous Claude models struggled to play Pokémon FireRed even with harnesses that gave them additional helpful tools, but Fable 5 beat FireRed with a minimal, vision-only harness.
A timelapse of Claude playing Pokémon FireRed from start to finish using only raw game screenshots — with no maps, navigation aids, or extra game-state information. Earlier Claude models needed a complex helper harness to play Pokémon; Claude Fable 5 completed the game with vision alone.

The Claude Fable 5 AI model also trains its memory and long-context functionality by playing Slay the Spire and Anthropic claims it reaches the final act three times more often than the Opus 4.8 model.

You may be asking yourself why any of this matters, and while that is a great question, these AI companies need random benchmarks to tout performance of the latest models. Maybe someday we won't even have to play video games for fun, and we can just have our AI agents do that for us while we sit alone in the corner remembering when we had potable water and could afford consoles and PCs.

Keep it locked on Shacknews for all the video game and technology news you can handle as the AI bubble continues to inflate.

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