Perplexity says its decision API cleared Pokémon FireRed's Elite Four
Chief executive Aravind Srinivas posted a video of the run, saying the API answered in a median 592 milliseconds and the whole run cost an estimated $0.028.
Perplexity chief executive Aravind Srinivas posted a video on Sunday of Pokémon FireRed's Elite Four and Champion cleared "in one shot", with decisions made by Perplexity's Decisions API. The clip and the figures come from his post, and nobody outside the company has verified the run.
https://x.com/AravSrinivas/status/2106688463542333795
Srinivas listed the run's stats: a median API response of 592 milliseconds, a 95th-percentile response of 987 milliseconds, 96.4 percent of responses under one second, and 137 live API calls. He put the estimated inference cost of the whole run at $0.028.
Perplexity's documentation describes the Decisions API as returning probabilities instead of text: yes-or-no answers, a pick from a list of options, or a score on a rubric. It runs on a single model, pplx-decider-v1-27b, priced at $0.04 per million input tokens with free output. The docs do not mention Pokémon.
The post does not say how the game state reached the API, how long the run took in real time, or whether the Elite Four were fought with a team prepared in advance. The documentation says requests of a few hundred input tokens answer in under two seconds, which fits the order of magnitude Srinivas reports.