Humans Have Lost, Sony's AI Technology Beats The World's Best Racers From The Game Gran Turismo

Sony's AI technology, beat the best racers in Gran Turismo game. (photo: doc. Unsplash)

JAKARTA - Sony has successfully created an artificial intelligence agency called Gran Turismo Sophy (GT Sophy). Sources at the game company, on Wednesday, February 9 stated that this technology is able to beat the world's best racer from the PlayStation racing simulation game, Gran Turismo.

To set up GT Sophy in gaming, different Sony units brought in fundamental AI research, hyper-realistic real-world racing simulators, and infrastructure for large-scale AI training, the company said in a statement.

Reported by Reuters, AI first raced against the four best Gran Turismo drivers in July. They learned from the race and outperformed the human racers in another race in October.

“It took about 20 PlayStations running simultaneously for about 10 to 12 days to train the Sophy GT to race from scratch to superhuman level,” said Peter Wurman, director of Sony AI America and leader of the team that designed the AI.

AI has also been used to defeat humans in the games of chess, Mahjong and Go. However, Sony says it's difficult to master racing car driving techniques because many decisions have to be made in real time. It is this reflex movement that may be very difficult for AI to learn.

Sony rival Microsoft, which recently bought game company Activision for $69 billion, has also used games to enhance AI by offering new challenges for AI models to solve.

Gran Turismo, a racing simulation video game, debuted in 1997 and has sold over 80 million units. Sony wants to apply those learnings to other PlayStation games.

"There are a lot of games that present different challenges to AI and we look forward to starting to address those issues," he said.