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Show HN: Jevman – AI decision models play Pac-Man

https://opper.ai/jevman-benchmark/

Openai just launched their decisions endpoint, cloudflare launched clef the other week, and many more jev alternatives are out there.

We wanted to put the popular ones to the test and thought Pac-Man is a good benchmark for simple and fast decision making.

So we let jev 1.13, kev, clef, clef flash, GPT-6 Luna and Laya play Pac-Man against bot ghosts.

The low latency of these models allows for real time play. We had each model play 100 games, published a leader board and open-sourced the repo so anyone can run their own model and join the ranking. Link to repo: https://github.com/opper-ai/jevman-benchmark/blob/main/CONTR...

You can also join the game and play as Pac-Man yourself, and the ghosts are the models, either a mix of models or all jev, kev, clef etc. A game costs about 2 cent, all models are running via my startup opper, and we added free credits for everyone to try.

It's pretty fun to play and surprisingly difficult to beat jev's highscore. Any feedback is more than welcome!

( 23 comments | 6 points | on HN )
Re:Show HN: Jevman – AI decision models play Pac-Man by gsandahl on Thursday October 08, 2026 @04:40PM (#50011902)
very cool :)
Re:Show HN: Jevman – AI decision models play Pac-Man by ozozozd on Thursday October 08, 2026 @08:25PM (#50014356)
Super cool!

I wish the controls were a little easier on mobile.

Re:Show HN: Jevman – AI decision models play Pac-Man by felix089 on Friday October 09, 2026 @04:34AM (#50017693)
Thank you and yea agreed fixing it now, try again in an hour from now :)
Re:Show HN: Jevman – AI decision models play Pac-Man by NichoPaolucci on Thursday October 08, 2026 @09:18PM (#50014799)
This is neat. At least I'm still better than the models at pac-man.

Also love the idea of a shared pool for users to try things out. I was considering more of a crowdfunded approach for one of my toy projects, something like... Giving it $10 in credits to begin and somehow allowing users to feed a buck in if they wanted.

Re:Show HN: Jevman – AI decision models play Pac-Man by gsandahl on Friday October 09, 2026 @01:28AM (#50016347)
yeah we had a lot of success with this also with another project, ai roundtable: https://opper.ai/ai-roundtable/history
Re:Show HN: Jevman – AI decision models play Pac-Man by felix089 on Friday October 09, 2026 @06:58AM (#50018763)
Great to hear, if it's about inference credits we actually built a thing called an AI wallet where users can just easily pay for their own inference on apps. if that's interesting lmk, id be happy to support this https://opper.ai/ai-wallet
Re:Show HN: Jevman – AI decision models play Pac-Man by nico on Thursday October 08, 2026 @09:42PM (#50014967)
Very cool, are you also testing local, cpu-runnable/trainable models/classifiers?

I trained some to do some interesting things, including playing doom: https://github.com/nicobrenner/jeffy

I’ll try training one for this benchmark, seems like fun

Re:Show HN: Jevman – AI decision models play Pac-Man by fancyswimtime on Friday October 09, 2026 @03:03AM (#50017050)
Yes, try with toxic/toxichat and CFPB
Re:Show HN: Jevman – AI decision models play Pac-Man by felix089 on Friday October 09, 2026 @04:51AM (#50017840)
Not yet but the repo is open source and set up so that you can benchmark your own model and we can add it to the leaderboard, would be cool to see if Jeffy can play: https://github.com/opper-ai/jevman-benchmark/blob/main/CONTR...
Re:Show HN: Jevman – AI decision models play Pac-Man by alyssassan on Friday October 09, 2026 @04:55AM (#50017875)
Jev is useful to run locally overnight: it can classify the results while you sleep, ready for you to review in the morning.
Re:Show HN: Jevman – AI decision models play Pac-Man by bayarearefugee on Thursday October 08, 2026 @09:46PM (#50014989)
Paying 2 cents per game to avoid playing it.

What even is this reality.

Re:Show HN: Jevman – AI decision models play Pac-Man by gsandahl on Friday October 09, 2026 @01:28AM (#50016349)
haha thats one way to look at it :)
Re:Show HN: Jevman – AI decision models play Pac-Man by hung on Thursday October 08, 2026 @10:56PM (#50015449)
Shouldn't it be running at every tick of the game rather than just the junctions? Pac-Man should be able to change direction at any point.
Re:Show HN: Jevman – AI decision models play Pac-Man by hyperhello on Friday October 09, 2026 @01:30AM (#50016361)
It may not matter if the ghosts' next move is predictable over that maximum distance.
Re:Show HN: Jevman – AI decision models play Pac-Man by theowaway213456 on Friday October 09, 2026 @09:17AM (#50020093)
That requires much more thinking (because of calculation) though doesn't it? Which decision models are not optimized for.
Re:Show HN: Jevman – AI decision models play Pac-Man by hyperhello on Friday October 09, 2026 @02:01PM (#50024365)
Speculating, but it seems like needing to be able to change direction at any moment would be more calculating, not less.
Re:Show HN: Jevman – AI decision models play Pac-Man by felix089 on Friday October 09, 2026 @11:49AM (#50022261)
Ideally yes but that would not work with the model latency. But it is already partly covered when a ghost enters pacmans corridor he is asked again. Here's how the decisions work in detail https://github.com/opper-ai/jevman-benchmark/blob/main/READM...
Re:Show HN: Jevman – AI decision models play Pac-Man by soltanov on Friday October 09, 2026 @12:38AM (#50016032)
Running cloud API inference for Pac-Man is peak modern software engineering. A 2 MB local ONNX model on a CPU core beats network round-trip jitter every time.
Re:Show HN: Jevman – AI decision models play Pac-Man by ismailmaj on Friday October 09, 2026 @06:54AM (#50018732)
it would be nice to have a regular LLM for reference
Re:Show HN: Jevman – AI decision models play Pac-Man by felix089 on Friday October 09, 2026 @07:16PM (#50027778)
Someone actually ran the benchmark on Qwen 3.8 Flash Next NVFP4, which is a chat model and submitted it via PR. We merged and it's live on the leader board in the top 3.
Re:Show HN: Jevman – AI decision models play Pac-Man by felix089 on Friday October 09, 2026 @12:00PM (#50022442)
Quick update, we doubled the models tested based on community contributions, and a new model took the #1 spot. also well over 1000 games have been played against decision model ghosts. https://opper.ai/jevman-benchmark/#leaderboard
Re:Show HN: Jevman – AI decision models play Pac-Man by gsandahl on Friday October 09, 2026 @03:52PM (#50025793)
i guess a model trained on this game will end up taking the #1 at some point
Re:Show HN: Jevman – AI decision models play Pac-Man by angeloleone1204 on Saturday October 10, 2026 @07:04AM (#50031700)
Good to know I can still beat AI