Blog

Gran Turismo Sophy™, Five Years On: From Nature Cover to Open Frontier

Admin — Wed, 01 Jul 2026 02:43:23 GMT

In early 2020, a handful of researchers had an ambitious idea: Build an AI agent that could beat the best drivers in the world at Gran Turismo™, the PlayStation® racing simulation game. Five years later, that agent is a permanent feature in a game played by millions. It is a case study in how research becomes a product and a platform generating new questions (and some answers) about the future of reinforcement learning.

Advancing AI: Highlights from June

Admin — Wed, 01 Jul 2026 02:17:43 GMT

June brought another milestone for Project Ace. Our autonomous table tennis robot, Ace, beat ranked professional players under official competition rules. We also presented six papers at CVPR 2026 in Denver. And our AI ethics research reached a wider audience through a TIME op-ed on data rights. Here is a look at what we worked on this month, and what is coming next.

What Happened After the Nature Paper: Ace vs. Professional Players

The Ace Team — Wed, 10 Jun 2026 16:00:00 GMT

In our recent Nature paper, we outlined how Ace, our autonomous table tennis robot, could compete with and beat elite players in matches that took place in April of 2025, but we were unable to outplay professional players. That result proved a real-world AI system could rally and win against high-level human opponents.

CVPR 2026: Sony AI's Latest in Computer Vision Research

Admin — Mon, 01 Jun 2026 18:10:43 GMT

The Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition conference (CVPR) brings together work that defines how machines see, reconstruct, and generate the visual world. This year, Sony AI and its collaborators are presenting six papers at CVPR 2026 in Denver.

Advancing AI: Highlights from May

Admin — Mon, 01 Jun 2026 16:00:00 GMT

May put sound at the center of Sony AI’s research. From 11 papers at ICASSP that push audio systems to be more honest about what they understand, to Woosh, a foundation model built for the people who design sound for games and film, the month showed careful research and practical tooling moving together. Stay tuned, June highlights next month will bring new deep-dives, news updates, and conference coverage.

Introducing Woosh: Sony AI's Sound Effect Foundation Model

Admin — Mon, 18 May 2026 16:46:22 GMT

Sony AI has been working on a problem most generative audio models have overlooked: sound effects. Specifically, the tools that sound designers, game audio directors, and creative professionals rely on to build the sonic worlds behind games and film.

Sony AI at ICASSP 2026: Research Roundup

Admin — Wed, 06 May 2026 18:23:44 GMT

Introduction

Sony AI will present 11 accepted papers at ICASSP 2026 in Barcelona this May. The work spans music understanding, generative audio, audio-visual alignment, and data quality. Each theme reflects a different pressure point in the field.

Advancing AI: Highlights from April

Admin — Thu, 30 Apr 2026 22:38:11 GMT

April was a defining month for Sony AI. Project Ace, the table tennis research project five years in the making, reached the cover of Nature and traveled across more than 1,800 articles in 30+ countries. Beyond Ace, our Chief Scientist, Peter Stone contributed a new framework for understanding AI companionship, returned to ICLR 2026 with a full slate of papers, and opened a window into the future of AI-powered chip design. Here is a closer look at what shaped April across the lab and beyond.

Sony AI at ICLR 2026: Research Roundup

Admin — Thu, 23 Apr 2026 23:58:26 GMT

For several years, Sony AI has contributed research to the International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR), engaging in conversations that sit at the core of modern machine learning. ICLR has become a key forum for work that shapes how models are trained, interpreted, and deployed in real systems, making it a natural home for research that spans from theory to creative application.

Inside Project Ace: Discover the Robot Athlete That Competes With Professional Table Tennis Players

Admin — Wed, 22 Apr 2026 14:59:59 GMT

On a recent afternoon in Tokyo, Sony AI Director and Lead Engineer, Peter Dürr, alongside project team members, watched a table-tennis ball vanish and reappear in front of him with narrowed eyes.