TRACK GPT

Al's teaching sim racers to improve-what about other games?

- Phil Iwaniuk

Here’s something nice and comforting about track racing: you know what’s going to happen next. While nearly every other genre is constantly trying to defy and subvert your expectations about what lies just around the corner, some even introducing procedural generation so that even the game doesn’t know what’s going to happen next, in sim racing it’s about doing the same thing, over and over again, but better.

And that gives it a unique advantage: it’s easier to teach someone how to be quick around a track than it is to teach them how to win a round of CounterStrike 2 or score a goal in FC24, because there are fewer variables. When you’re hotlapping for a new record you don’t have to factor in what anyone’s doing around you, and the track isn’t being recalibrated from lap to lap. You learn the braking points, the racing lines and the throttle inputs and then you perfect them.

This isn’t news in itself, of course, but it’s important because it means AI can be used in a different way in racing games. Not just to program offline opponents who seem much smarter than their counterparts in shooters and battle royales, but to build AI tutors who can teach you how to drive faster.

Enter Trophi AI, the latest sim racing coach to aggressively target your Instagram feed, offering one-on-one coaching of a different kind. The non-human kind.