Sony's new AI-based Gran Turismo agent can beat top gamers

Sony AI has now joined hands with Polyphony Digital and Sony Interactive Entertainment (SIE) to reveal Gran Turismo Sophy, a racing AI agent.

The company claimed that GT Sophy could outrace the best players of the PlayStation racing simulation game GT Sport.

Kenichiro Yoshida, Chairman, President, and CEO, Sony Group Corporation, said, "Sony’s Purpose is to ‘fill the world with emotion, through the power of creativity and technology,’ and Gran Turismo Sophy is a perfect embodiment of this. This group collaboration in which we have built a game AI for gamers is truly unique to Sony as a creative entertainment company. It signals a significant leap in the advancement of AI while also offering enhanced experiences to GT fans around the world."

Hiroaki Kitano, CEO of Sony AI, said, "Gran Turismo Sophy is a significant development in AI whose purpose is not simply to be better than human players, but to offer players a stimulating opponent that can accelerate and elevate the players’ techniques and creativity to the next level. In addition to making contributions to the gaming community, we believe this breakthrough presents new opportunities in areas such as autonomous racing, autonomous driving, high-speed robotics, and control."

Sony AI revealed that the GT Sophy is an autonomous AI agent which has been developed using a combination of Sony AI’s deep reinforcement learning platform, PDI’s real driving simulator GT, and SIE’s cloud gaming infrastructure.

Sony AI has tested the capabilities of GT Sophy by racing against four of the world's best Gran Turismo drivers in two Race Together 2021 Challenges events which took place on the 2nd of July and 21st of October 2021.

By making some of the major improvements to the agent based on the results of the first race, GT Sophy outperformed the best human GT drivers in both time trial races and an FIA Certified Gran Turismo Championships format race for the second event in October.