'Gran Turismo' barely outraces 'Barbie' in N.America theaters

LOS ANGELES - Sony's sports action film "Gran Turismo" didn't exactly roar to the front of the North American box office, but did make it there on a slow late-August weekend, beating a still-turbo-powered "Barbie."

Based on a popular video game, "Gran Turismo" took in an estimated $17.3 million for the Friday-through-Sunday period, industry watcher Exhibitor Relations reported Sunday.

"This is a lukewarm opening for an action film based on a video game," particularly compared to previous game-based films like "Warcraft" ($439 million in worldwide ticket sales) and "Rampage" ($428 million), analyst David A. Gross said.

The movie stars David Harbour and Orlando Bloom in a story about a racing academy that recruits skilled video gamers to train them as real race-car drivers.

Warner Bros.' "Barbie," meantime, has remained a steady seat-filler, with its $17.1 million take in its sixth week out propelling it to a $594 million domestic total.

The Greta Gerwig film recently overtook "The Super Mario Bros. Movie" ($574 million) as the year's domestic box office champ. Add to that the $745 million "Barbie" has earned overseas.

Analysts said Sony's accounting of ticket sales for "Gran Turismo" was a bit wonky (including millions in pre-sales) and predicted "Barbie" might, in the final tally, be the weekend's Number One -- as she is Ken's.

Last weekend's leader, superhero flick "Blue Beetle" from DC Studios and Warner Bros., dipped to third, at $12.8 million, a nearly 50 percent drop from the previous weekend. Xolo Mariduena, as the Beetle, became the first live-action Latino protagonist.

In fourth was Universal's "Oppenheimer," earning an estimated $9 million. The atom bomb origin story has now surpassed $300 million in domestic earnings, with an additional $477 million overseas.

And in fifth place was Paramount's animated "Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem," the latest chapter in the heroes-in-a-half-shell saga, at $6.1 million.

Rounding out the top 10 were:

"Meg 2: The Trench" ($5.1 million)

"Strays" ($4.7 million)

"Retribution" ($3.5 million)

"The Hill" ($2.5 million)

"Haunted Mansion" ($2.1 million)

Agence France-Presse

Sony's new AI beats humans in Gran Turismo racing game

Sony said on Wednesday it has created an artificial intelligence agent called Gran Turismo Sophy (GT Sophy) that was able to beat world's best drivers of the PlayStation racing simulation game Gran Turismo.

To get GT Sophy ready for the game, different units of Sony brought in fundamental AI research, a hyper-realistic real world racing simulator, and infrastructure for massive scale AI training, the company said in a statement.

The AI first raced against four best Gran Turismo drivers in July, learnt from the race and outperformed the human drivers in another race in October.

"It took about 20 PlayStations running simultaneously for about 10 to 12 days to train GT Sophy to race from scratch to superhuman level," said Peter Wurman, director of Sony AI America and the leader of the team who designed the AI.

While AI had been used to defeat humans in the games of chess, Mahjong and Go, Sony said the difficulty in mastering race car driving was the many decisions that need to be made in real time.

Sony's rival, Microsoft, which recently bought Activision for $69 billion, has been using games to improve AI by offering up new challenges for AI models to solve.

Gran Turismo, a racing simulation video game, made its debut in 1997 and has sold over 80 million units.

Sony wants to apply the learnings to other PlayStation games.

"There are a lot of games that pose different challenges for AI and we're looking forward to starting to work on those problems," he said. (Reporting by Supantha Mukherjee, European Technology & Telecoms Correspondent, based in Stockholm; Editing by Sandra Maler)

-reuters