After nearly a decade in development, Grand Theft Auto VI is finally set to release this November. Considering that Grand Theft Auto V first came out in 2013, the wait has been even longer for many fans.
Now one AI startup founder apparently can’t wait any longer, so he’s trying to code his own version.
“Day 1 of making GTA 6. Still fake typing this,” the 25-year-old wrote. Ziwen Xu in X this wednesday. “Just upgraded Claude Max to 20x for this. Spent a few hours structuring the whole project and moving it to the repo.”
The post included a short clip of the game, which on day one basically consisted of a 3D blue oval moving and jumping around some gray blocks.
Xu seems quite sincere about the effort. He has been posting and even sharing updates every day since the original post Code repository on GitHub. Still, it makes you wonder how much time he takes from his day job as the founder of this project Hyperechoa startup that helps companies deploy “AI workers.”
“Goal: beat the real GTA 6 to start. Ambitious, probably stupid, doing it anyway,” wrote Xu.
The project appears to have been inspired by a post by another AI startup founder and investor.
“Someone should set up a community-funded Fable run with a command like: ‘/until we create a GTA-VI-caliber open-world game of quality and scope that surpasses the initial trailers,'” wrote Matt Schumer. post Reposted by Xu.
Basically, the idea is to see if Claude Fable 5, a safer public version of Anthropic’s more advanced Mythos model, can code a GTA-style video game vibe.
Vibe coding is a relatively new approach where developers rely heavily on AI assistants to generate and debug code using natural language prompts.
Some high-profile tech founders like this approach. Jack Dorsey at least two apps with vibe code last year. Meanwhile, OpenAI co-founder Andrej Karpathy, who coined the term, says that the use of AI agents “net worthless.”
Again, on the second day Xu a video showed off a more human-looking character running around the cityscape, though he admits it’s still far from perfect.
“The agent built skyscrapers in downtown LA, which is a problem because it was supposed to be Florida,” Xu wrote. “I also burned 33% of my weekly usage 20 times in one day. So the clock is ticking.”
As of today updateit included NPCs walking around the game, cars driving on the roads, and even weapons.
It will be interesting to see how far Xu and his collaborators can take the project. If Rockstar doesn’t delay the game again, their deadline is still months away.
