Some things come to us nearly instantly: “what day is it today?” Others take much more mental stamina, like solving a cryptic crossword or debugging a complex piece of code. We can choose to apply more or less cognitive effort depending on the task at hand.
Now, Claude has that same flexibility. With the new Claude 3.7 Sonnet, users can toggle “extended thinking mode” on or off, directing the model to think more deeply about trickier questions1. And developers can even set a “thinking budget” to control precisely how long Claude spends on a problem.
Playing Pokémon—specifically, the Game Boy classic Pokémon Red—is just such a task. We equipped Claude with basic memory, screen pixel input, and function calls to press buttons and navigate around the screen, allowing it to play Pokémon continuously beyond its usual context limits, sustaining gameplay through tens of thousands of interactions.