First, Sony made an unbeatable AI driver; now, it's retrained it to be a good NPC.
A gran turismo 7 screenshot
Emojis above the cars give you a clue as to the disposition of that particular AI agent at the time. Credit: Polyphony Digital
In 2022, a team of AI researchers at Sony sat down and made an AI agent that was nearly unbeatable at the racing game Gran Turismo 7. More than just car control, the agent, called GT Sophy, also had to learn racing tactics and strategies—and even etiquette. Up against the world's best human players, Sophy beat the humans by 104 races to 52 in a match in 2021.
Since then, Sony and Polyphony Digital have been hard at work retraining it from being able to dominate the world's best with ease into something that's more fun for the rest of us to compete against. The latest refinement is GT Sophy 2.1, which appeared as part of GT7's latest update yesterday. It's now enabled at more tracks, and you can finally set up custom races at those tracks using the better AI.
“Since we first introduced GT Sophy three years ago, we have worked closely with [Polyphony Digital] to explore how AI can enhance gameplay and create more dynamic and fun racing experiences for players of all skill levels," said Kaushik Subramanian, senior staff research scientist at Sony AI. "With GT Sophy 2.1, we are giving players more control than ever over their interactions with GT Sophy by allowing them to fine-tune gameplay, experiment with new strategies, and advance their racing skills."
GT Sophy can now race at 19 tracks, up from the nine that were introduced in November 2023. The AI agent is an alternative to the regular, dumber AI in the game's quick race mode, with easy, medium, and hard settings. But now, at those same tracks, you can also create custom races using GT Sophy, meaning you're no longer limited to just two or three laps. You can enable things like damage, fuel consumption and tire wear, and penalties, and you can have some control over the cars you race against.
Gran Turismo 7 screenshot
Polyphony Digital
Polyphony Digital
Polyphony Digital
Polyphony Digital
Unlike the time-limited demo, the hardest setting is no longer alien-beating. As a GT7 player, I'm slowing with age, and I find the hard setting to be that—hard, but beatable. (I suspect but need to confirm that the game tailors the hardest setting to your ability based on your results, as, when I create a custom race on hard, only seven of the nine progress bars are filled, and in the screenshot above, only five bars are filled.)
Having realistic competition has always been one of the tougher challenges for a racing game, and one that the GT franchise was never particularly great at during previous console generations. This latest version of GT Sophy does feel different to race against: The AI is opportunistic and aggressive but also provokable into mistakes. If only the developer would add it to more versions of the in-game Nürburgring.