Sony may not be known for its expertise in the field of artificial intelligence but its credentials in gaming are second to none. After all, for the last two generations, the PS4 and PS5 have been handily the best selling consoles and if one dials back to the mid-90s since the launch of the original PlayStation, aside from the PS3, Sony has dominated the space. And one of the games that has helped it achieve this zenith is the Gran Turismo franchise that originally debuted on the first PlayStation back in 1997. For the latest iteration of the game - Gran Turismo 7 which will debut for the PS5 and PS4, Sony's AI team has developed an AI-based driver called GT Sophy which it believes is so advanced that it can even help with the development of self-driving cars.
"Sophy is very fast, with lap times better than expected for the best drivers. But watching Sophy, there were certain moves that I only believed were possible afterward," said Takuma Miyazono, a champion e-sports racer in an interview with Wired magazine.
"Sophy is very fast, with lap times better than expected for the best drivers," he added.
While already AI has mastered games like Chess and Go, a racing game is far more complex. It is also more complex than action games like StarCraft and Dota.
In fact, Stanford's Chris Gerdes reveals techniques used to develop Sophy could help with the development of autonomous cars. Self-driving cars already need neural networks and that's the same type of technique Sony has deployed on Sophy to keep a track of road markings, perceive other vehicles and obstacles.
"GT Sophy's success on the track suggests that neural networks might one day have a larger role in the software of automated vehicles than they do today," Gerdes writes in a journal called Nature.
This comes after Sony showed off its Vision-s concept of electric cars first in 2020 at CES and then came out with a second iteration of its earlier this year. Alongside the showcase of the second electric prototype, the Japanese giant announced that it was planning on starting an EV business unit that will explore the commercialisation of electric vehicles.
"Sophy takes some racing lines that a human driver would never think of. I think a lot of the textbooks regarding driving skills will be rewritten," revealed Kazuhiro Yamauchi, the creator of Gran Turismo and the head of the Polyphony Digital studio that is owned by Sony.
