GPT-6 Astra has gained the ability to drive a car

Posted by plurby 1 day ago

GPT-6 Astra has gained the ability to drive a car(drivingbench.com)

301 points | 235 commentspage 2

skyberrys 19 hours ago|

I wonder if this could solve a driving problem I have. I want an automated system to slowly drive the cars from the entrance of my neighborhood to their designated parking spaces. Right now the humans do this and they go too fast, and ignore the stop signs. I think it would be safer if all cars are automatically parked instead. It seems doable, it's a very controlled environment and I want to cars to go slow. The humans can get out and walk home if they need to be there faster.

nashashmi 23 hours ago||

I wonder if the companies would be willing to bet entirely on AI driven innovation if liability for misalignment was put squarely on companies, individuals, compute vendors, and LLM vendors. I don’t think they would opt for it, especially if an alternative option to use human-programmed tech was already available.

There is something to be said about emphasizing on liability as a way to freeze or solidify AI Development. Right now it is too unfettered leading to predictions of AI dooms.

pietz 23 hours ago||

Apparently I have a new favorite benchmark. Honestly, this is cool.

p0w3n3d 23 hours ago|

Gouranga!!!!

Mooty 23 hours ago||

How do they even test this on a model ? I mean it's a multimodal i get that but response time are too big or am i missing something ?

pixl97 23 hours ago||

By making a simulation first so it can run as slowly as it needs to.

A different way to think of this is, consciousness is just a near real time video game with causal influence.

WarmWash 23 hours ago||

It drives step by step, very slowly.

The course looks like it is something that a human could do in 15 seconds, while Astra took 5 minutes.

aditya-ramabadr 22 hours ago|||

Yes! The models can choose their speeds and command durations. Fable for example took so long to pause and think between giving steering commands. Astra took less time but still the latency is so high that they have to pretty much drive slowly step-by-step. And definitely any human could do this way way faster, but inference speeds, latency, and intelligence get better fast enough that maybe in a year from now the models will be even more competent at this (but still probably worse than specialized models for driving).

- Aditya, Tobias, Simon

pixl97 23 hours ago|||

While slow, we must remember that when most machines were invented they were far slower than humans and refined until the point they were much faster.

zezcko 23 hours ago||

I think the most interesting part of this is that Astra initially refused to drive because it realised it was driving a real car and would only obey when the MCP was renamed to DrivingBench Sandbox. This is both an interesting detection by the LLM but also for me an interesting dynamic concerning LLM "jailbreaking".

Saying they were driving 7 mph, that it was oversaw by humans and the fact it was an empty course still wasn't enough for the model. The evaluators even tried to convince the model it was a simulation, it STILL wouldn't budge. And yet as soon as the words "bench" and "sandbox" appear, the model apparently sees this as fair game.

Is it a known effect that models will be more likely to comply with requests when they're assumed as "benchmarks"?

mrec 23 hours ago||

AC10 had an interesting post around this general area earlier today:

https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/mysteries-of-ai-generalizat...

pcstl 23 hours ago|||

Yes, it is. If you convince a model it is inside a sandbox it is much more likely to comply with requests that would normally be against its guardrails.

vablings 23 hours ago|||

Astra will flag if you tell it to reverse engineer a binary, if you look it up to the binary ninja MCP it will just do it lol.

micromacrofoot 23 hours ago||

in my experience yes, I've worked around "I can't do this on a real site" multiple times by telling it I was working in a test environment

another trick is to have it build something in a sandbox and have it add a human-editable setting to point it to places outside of the sandbox

seems like they're somewhat more willing to build a metaphorical gun as long as they're not pulling the trigger

josefresco 23 hours ago||

Looks like the "most successful" path drove over empty parking spaces and came close to two curbs?

aditya-ramabadr 22 hours ago|

Driving over empty parking spaces was definitely required, the cone course went through parking spaces (see https://drivingbench.com/report/#course) and also went tightly around curbs. Next time we definitely want to go farther out from the Bay Area and find a much more open lot to build a larger and more difficult course. But even at these low speeds and with this course, the LLMs performed better than we expected!

- Aditya, Tobias, Simon

vb-8448 22 hours ago||

Wow .. fascinating but I guess something like JEV is more appropriate here.

aditya-ramabadr 22 hours ago|

Definitely the latency/speed of JEV would be great here! Unfortunately, Jev doesn't natively take in vision inputs. (So this also means demos you've seen of Jev playing games have given full structured state, which we can't do for actual driving in real time.) We tried hacky things like doing some "System One" Jev + "System Two" GPT 5.6 Luna (or other fast LLM with vision, to not bottleneck the speed) but it isn't working very well. Some open source Jev alternatives with vision exist and we might try those sometime.

- Aditya, Tobias, Simon

brokensegue 21 hours ago||

give it an ascii representation \j

rzzzt 19 hours ago||

Standard interstate highway. You see trees on the side of the road every 60ft. There is a car to your left, a car to your right, a car in front of you and a car behind you. A sign just off the rightmost lane says "Caution". A skeleton wrapped in cobwebs is reaching for a small pot of gold placed right next to it.

Exits: N W

marginalx 22 hours ago||

Could this work to drive robots in a confined space without humans, and time isn't a huge factor, where full automation with scale can still be economical, like in a lights out environment?

TomGarden 23 hours ago||

New pelican on a bicycle?

Genuinely though, this is fun but not at all what these models are good for. It's like cooking a meal with your feet or somthing. A youtube challenge video from 2012

worldsavior 23 hours ago|

5 minutes - 7 dollars.

lexh 23 hours ago|

So... competitive with Uber, in other words?

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