Watch: Racing Gran Turismo Sophy 2.0 in Gran Turismo 7 Spec II
The return of the Gran Turismo Sophy AI, at least in PlayStation 5 versions of the game, is one of the main features of the most recent Gran Turismo 7 Spec II update. In our most recent video, lead video producer Chaz Draycott of GTPlanet takes the AI for a test drive.
In case you missed it, Sony AI, a specialized division of Sony, produced the new racing game AI system known as Sophy, which gets its name from the Greek suffix for “knowledge.” Polyphony Digital did not create the system.
The goal of one intern’s project at first was to create an AI racing game in Gran Turismo Sport that could outpace any human player’s speed. Florian Fuchs’ original concept, however, evolved into the current Sophy, which was created to offer a quick and tidy AI racing driver that exhibited more human-like behavior.
Using Sony’s cloud capabilities, the team trained millions of times to select the finest instances of the machine-learning system known as “Quantile-Regression Soft Actor-Critic” (QR-SAC), which is how they produced Sophy and are still developing it.
The resulting AI “agents” have already shown themselves to be capable of defeating the world’s quickest players twice and in a live setting at the World Series Showdown. In February 2023, they will make a restricted debut on our platforms.
During that time, Sony AI evaluated how players responded to Sophy and improved the system in preparation for a more significant, long-term launch on PlayStation 5, which started on November 2. Though it’s still a restricted mode with only nine tracks accessible at the moment, Sophy can now employ 340 of the game’s cars instead of just four.
Chaz has never experienced Sophy 2.0 before because he was not a member of the GTPlanet crew back in February. You can watch his responses in the video above, particularly to the reaction emojis that resemble Toyota pods.
Chaz attempts three races in total: a GT4 race at Red Bull Ring, a race at Laguna Seca in his tuned Porsche964, and a race at Tsukuba in a stock Ferrari 458,.
The tuned automobile is a little overpowering because Sophy seems to exclusively choose stock cars, as many gamers have noted. But the conventional machines reveal a lot more about how Sophy’s actions and strategies are more human — even prone to the odd hopeful leap and blunder, like when Chaz assists in writing off a $20,000,000 automobile.
Similar to our first impression from February 2023, when Sophy made her in-game debut, we are once more astonished by the new AI’s human-like conduct. Hopefully, track-by-track access will be expanded in upcoming game patches.
