Nearly two years after its prototype debut and eight months after its public beta, Sony's GT Sophy racing AI for Gran Turismo 7 is back, and going by Gran Turismo Sophy 2.0 now. It will be available to all PlayStation 5 users as part of the GT7 Spec II Update (Patch Update 1.40) being released on Wednesday, November 2 at 2 a.m. We got our first look at the Sophy system back in February 2022. At that point it was already handily beating professional Gran Turismo players. "Gran Turismo Sophy is a significant development in AI whose purpose is not simply to be better than human players, but to offer players a stimulating opponent that can accelerate and elevate the players' techniques and creativity to the next level," Sony AI CEO, Hiroaki Kitano, said at the time.

A solid six percent of Americans think they can out-punch a Grizzly bear, another one in eight men think they can beat 23-time grand slam champion Serena Williams at tennis. On February 21st, this proud internet tradition of being very loud and very wrong about your physical prowess continues! On Tuesday, gamers around the world will get their shot at racing Sony AI's GT Sophy -- the one that's already wiping the floor with folks who get paid to play this game professionally -- when it arrives in the rev1.29 update for Gran Turismo 7 on the Playstation 5. GT7 players will be able to access a special "Gran Turismo Sophy Race Together" mode from February 21st at 1am ET, when the update arrives. Players will face off against four separate GT Sophy AI opponents, all of whom's vehicles are specced slightly differently so you're not going up against a quartet of clones, in a four-circuit series striated by difficulty (beginner-intermediate-expert). "The difference [between racers] is that, it's essentially the power you have versus the other cars on the track," Michael Spranger told Engadget.

In Early February 2022, Sony's "first AI breakthrough", GT Sophy, made its appearance on the cover page of Nature magazine [2]. GT Sophy is a racing AI built to match with world-class level players in Gran Turismo Sport, the latest installation of the legendary game series on PlayStation 4. GT7 is famous for its extremely realistic simulation of real-life racing experience, which largely complicates the production of GT Sophy at the early stage. Every tiny decision that GT Sophy makes may change the result of the race entirely. Thus, there is little simplification can be done to the training process. Sony's AI team needs to take all possible factors, like drifting effects caused by the passage of nearby cars, to perform any estimation.

Last week OpenAI moved DALL-E 2, the image generation tool, into Beta (the company hopes to expand its current user base to 1 million) while granting users the "the right to reprint, sell, and merchandise" images they generate with DALL-E. This is useful for users who wish to use the generated images for commercial purposes, like making illustrations for children's books. Other openly available AI image generation models face similar problems. Also, it's not clear if OpenAI violated any IP laws for just training on these Internet images and then commercializing their model. While the UK is exploring allowing commercial use of models trained on public but trademarked data, the U.S. may not follow suit.

Gran Turismo now joins a long list of games in which AIs have beaten people, including shogi, Go, Starcraft, classic Atari video games, and multiplayer series Defense of the Ancients, for which the Microsoft-backed OpenAI created a fighter bot. But Gran Turismo has higher complexity than other console games, requiring players to balance the physics of friction and aerodynamics, all while making split-second judgment calls and reacting to shifting landscapes with light-speed reflex. And even beyond that, experts say Sophy's achievements stand out in its capacity to behave aggressively, yet still fairly, and to observe the gamers' code of conduct beyond just the letter of the law--in other words, to embody the subtle nuances of human character. While technically legal, Sony didn't want Sophy to win by bullying other racers off the road. To make sure it wouldn't, they trained its neural network by levying penalties for collisions with other drivers, for example--using a trial-and-error process referred to as reinforcement learning.

Sony has developed what it's calling a breakthrough artificial intelligence program for the Gran Turismo series of PlayStation racing games. The software, called Gran Turismo Sophy, is so sophisticated, Sony says, that it handily beat a group of the world's best virtual race car drivers in test version of the 2017 game Gran Turismo Sport in October. "Outracing human drivers so skillfully in a head-to-head competition represents a landmark achievement for AI," Chris Gerdes, a Stanford professor specializing in autonomous driving, wrote in a Nature article published alongside Sony's research. Gerdes said this research could one day affect self-driving car development, according to Wired. "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 wrote.

Hyper-capable AIs have been beating us at our own games for years. Whether it's Go or Jeopardy, DOTA 2 or Nethack, artificial intelligences have routinely proven themselves superior competitors, helping advance not only the state of gaming arts but also those of machine learning and computational science as well. On Wednesday, Sony announced its latest addition to the field, GT Sophy, an AI racer capable of taking on -- and beating -- some of the world's best Gran Turismo players. GT Sophy (the GT stands for "Gran Turismo") is the result of a collaboration between Sony AI, Polyphony Digital (PDI) and Sony Interactive Entertainment (SIE), as well as more than half a decade of research and development. "Gran Turismo Sophy is a significant development in AI whose purpose is not simply to be better than human players, but to offer players a stimulating opponent that can accelerate and elevate the players' techniques and creativity to the next level," Sony AI CEO, Hiroaki Kitano, said in a statement Wednesday.