GPT-6 Astra tested on iconic helicopter mission from GTA: Vice City

AI technologies are steadily evolving and finding unexpected tasks and tests.

The developers of Grand Theft Auto: Vice City featured a wide variety of missions in the game. One of them became a true nightmare for many players, remembered decades after the game’s release.

According to the plot of the iconic Demolition Man mission, protagonist Tommy Vercetti must help Avery Carrington destroy a construction site. To do this, he needs to plant several bombs inside a building under construction, but there is a catch.

Tommy must not plant the bombs personally, but instead use an RC Goblin remote-controlled helicopter to deliver them. The character himself remains inside a Top Fun van parked near the construction site during this time.

Researcher Yuntian Deng decided to run an experiment by testing artificial intelligence capabilities in this mission from GTA: Vice City. He sent the GPT-6 Astra model to complete the mission, with gameplay streamed from the iPad version of the game.

It was noticeable that the AI struggled to cope with the local control physics. Nevertheless, the AI successfully managed to chop up a builder with the helicopter blades and then plant the first bomb. The researcher shared that GPT-6 Astra figured out that it could “turn GTA into a turn-based game.” As a result, it operated in a cycle: pause, think (analyze the screenshot), calculate movement, unpause and execute the maneuver, after which the sequence of actions repeated.

However, even turn-based mode did not save it from defeat. After planting the first bomb, the AI headed back to the van to retrieve the next bomb. At that exact moment, the run was cut short as it crashed loudly into a wall and exploded, after which the screen displayed a message familiar to many gamers: MISSION FAILED.

Image source: yuntiandeng’s X account

The experiment demonstrated that even modern AI models, such as GPT-6 Astra, still experience difficulties with such complex tasks in video games. The researcher published the developments of the “Astra plays GTA Vice City” project publicly on GitHub in the da03 repository.