OUTSMARTING HUMANS JUST ONE STEP FOR AI VIDEO GAME PLAYERS

Speed around a French village in the video game Grand Turismo and you might spot a Corvette behind you trying to catch your slipstream.

The technique of using the draft of an opponent’s racecar to speed up and overtake them is one favored by skilled players of PlayStation’s realistic racing game.

But this Corvette driver is not being controlled by a human — it’s GT Sophy, a powerful artificial intelligence agent built by PlayStation maker Sony.

Grand Turismo players have been competing against computer-generated racecars since the franchise launched in the 1990s, but the new AI driver that was unleashed last week on Grand Turismo 7 is smarter and faster because it’s been trained using the latest AI methods.

“Grand Turismo had a built-in AI existing from the beginning of the game, but it has a very narrow band of performance and it isn’t very good,” said Michael Spranger, chief operating officer of Sony AI. “It’s very predictable. Once you get past a certain level, it doesn’t really entice you anymore.”

But now, he said, “this AI is going to put up a fight.”

Visit an artificial intelligence laboratory at universities and companies like Sony, Google, Meta, Microsoft, and ChatGPT-maker OpenAI and it’s not unusual to find AI agents like Sophy racing cars, slinging angry birds at pigs, fighting epic interstellar battles or helping human gamers build new Minecraft worlds -- all part of the job description for computer systems trying to learn how to get smarter in games.