Sony AI America director Pete Wurman has revealed that his team and Polyphony Digital are working together in order to bring the machine reinforcement learning Sophy AI to Gran Turismo in a “much larger and permanent sense”.
Wurman was speaking in a special presentation on Gran Turismo Sophy at the Sony Creators Conference, an event running alongside the Special Interest Group on Computer Graphics and Interactive Techniques (SIGGRAPH) conference at the Los Angeles Convention Center.
Much of Wurman’s presentation will be familiar to anyone who’s been following GTPlanet’s coverage since the AI’s genesis. It covered details from how and why the project started right through to the most recent in-game Race Together event in Gran Turismo 7, although with a few interesting little notes about how Sophy is trained and selected for events and the manner in which it perceives other cars.
PlayStation 5 owners may well recall the Race Together event held earlier this year, which added GT Sophy in a limited fashion in events at a handful of tracks — although PS4 owners missed out.
Right at the end of the presentation though, Wurman included a section on what’s coming next for Sophy and it’s good news for Gran Turismo players with a more expansive offering in the works.
Sony AI, he says, is working with PD to bring Sophy to the game in a “larger and permanent sense”, with the AI being trained on “a lot tracks with a lot of cars” and available for a “much wider range of playing skills”.
That echoes some of the comments Wurman expressed to GTPlanet in our own recent interview, where the project lead talked about a further collaboration with PD to make a more flexible version of the AI agent, along with the difficulties involved in making it slower while retaining its more human driving style.
For now there’s no timeline on when we’ll see further implementations of GT Sophy in Gran Turismo — nor even if it’s in the current title — but we’ll be eagerly anticipating the chance to try it out again.
We may learn more at the Gran Turismo World Series Showdown in Amsterdam this weekend, where Sophy will once again be involved in an exhibition race ahead of the Manufacturers Cup finals on Friday August 11.
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