Did I brick my ESP8266 ESP01 on Pico?

if I do the following:

• set GPIO0 pin to GND on the ESP01 board
  
• clicked the firmware update button (firmware downloads)
  
• when the IDE reports: syncing.., I ground the ESP01 reset pin, then the IDE reports writing block x / 1024 (where x increments)
  
• blue LED flashed on ESP01 while the block value increments
  
• when it gets to 512, the process bombs out with the following IDE message:
  
  

The Firmware update failed: Unexpected response {"dir":1,"cmd":3,"len":2,"data":"\u0001\­b"}

@Gordon, what do you think?