Grand Theft Auto VI is finally coming out in November, after being in development for about a decade. For many fans, the wait has felt even longer considering Grand Theft Auto V first came out in 2013.
Now, the founder of an AI startup apparently can’t wait any longer, so he’s trying to code his own version.
“GTA 6 build day 1. Still feels fake writing that,” wrote one 25-year-old. Ziwen Xu in X this Wednesday. “Upgraded to Claude Max 20x just for this. Spent a couple of hours structuring the whole project and pushing it to the repository.”
The post included a short clip of the game, which on day one mostly consisted of a 3D blue oval moving and jumping around some gray blocks.
Xu seems to be quite sincere about the effort. He has been posting updates every day since the original post and has even shared the code repository on GitHub. Still, one wonders how much time this project is taking away from his day job as founder of hyperechoa startup that helps companies deploy “AI employees.”
“The goal: beat the real GTA 6 at launch. Ambitious, probably stupid, to do it anyway,” Xu wrote.
The project appears to have been inspired by a post by another AI startup founder and investor.
“Someone should set up a community-funded run of Fable with a message like: ‘/loop until you’ve created a GTA-VI-caliber open-world game with a quality and scope beyond what’s shown in the initial trailers,'” Matt Shumer wrote in a mail reposted by Xu.
Basically, the idea is to see if Anthropic’s Claude Fable 5, a safer public version of the company’s most advanced Mythos model, could code a GTA-caliber video game.
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 coded vibration at least two applications last year. Meanwhile, OpenAI co-founder Andrej Karpathy, who coined the term, said that using AI agents is “useless net.”
Even so, on the second day Xu published a video showing a much more human-looking character running through an urban landscape, although he admitted it was still far from perfect.
“The agent built skyscrapers in downtown Los Angeles, which is a problem, because this is supposed to be Florida,” Xu wrote. “Plus, I’ve burned through 33% of my weekly usage 20 times in one day. So the clock is ticking.”
for today updateThe game included walking NPCs, cars driving on the roads, and even weapons.
It will be interesting to see how far Xu and his collaborators can take the project. The deadline is still months away, unless Rockstar delays the game once again.
