On Wednesday, Sony announced the creation of Gran Turismo Sophy (GT Sophy) which is an artificial intelligence agent. GT Sophy defeated the best drivers of the world in Gran Turismo – a PlayStation simulation racing game.
GT Sophy was trained for the game through a hyper-realistic real-world racing simulator, large scale AI training, and basic AI research. Its first race happened in July, where it defeated the four best drives of Gran Turismo. The data of the race was used to train the AI agent for October’s event where once again it remained ahead of human drivers.
According to Director Sony AI America Peter Wurman, GT Sophy was trained by 20 PlayStations that kept running for 12 days. Sony said racing games require multiple tasks to be done in real-time and they are looking into multiple games that may challenge AI in different ways.
Microsoft, arch-rival of Sony, has been using different challenges to train AI and has bought Activision for $69 billion for this purpose.