Asian Tech Press (Feb 10) -- Sony AI beats world champion-level players in PlayStation 4 racing game, said the Japanese company.

Gran Turismo Sophy (GT Sophy), an artificial intelligence (AI) agent co-developed by three Sony subsidiaries, demonstrated the ability to beat world champion-level players in PlayStation 4 racing simulation game, Gran Turismo.

In a statement, Sony's AI unit said that to get GT Sophy ready for the race, different Sony divisions brought "together expertise in fundamental AI research and development, a hyper-realistic real world racing simulator, and infrastructure for massive scale AI training."

Created in 1997, Gran Turismo is a series of racing simulation video games developed by Sony-owned Polyphony Digital.

GT Sophy first competed against four of the world's best Gran Turismo drivers last July and outperformed human drivers in another race last October.

Sony said in the statement, "GT Sophy aims to deliver new AI-powered gaming experiences to players around the world."

Also, the new breakthrough in AI was published in Nature in an article titled "Outracing Champion Gran Turismo Drivers with Deep Reinforcement Learning," and was the cover cover star of this week's edition.