OpenAI's Astra Model Went for a Drive and No One Died

"Arthur T Knackerbracket" writes:

First LLM to pass test did it in a parking lot at snail's pace, at considerable expense, but it still counts for something:

If you've ever wondered whether a generative AI model can drive a car, wonder no more: It can be done, at great expense and very slowly, so long as it can maintain an internet connection.

A trio of computer scientists has been putting various commercial AI models through road tests, to see how well they can drive a Toyota Corolla around a set of cones in a parking lot.

Their attempts to date, part of a project called DrivingBench, recorded sorry performances from GPT-5.6 Sol, Grok 4.6, and Claude Fable 5.1, none of which managed to complete the course.

Now comes word that OpenAI's GPT-6 Astra has succeeded where other commercial AI models have failed. On its second attempt, OpenAI's flagship model steered a car all of 134.7 meters to complete the course in 5 minutes, 22 seconds.

"GPT-6 Astra was the only model to fully complete the course (on attempt 2, in about 5 minutes)," the DrivingBench report says. "Claude Fable 5.1's third attempt got around halfway through the course, as did Astra's first attempt. All other attempts didn't make it past the first corner. Generally, the failure there was one of perception: reading which side of the first diagonal cone line the lane is on."

To complete that trip at an average speed of 0.94 miles per hour, researchers Tobias Gessler, Aditya Ramabadran, and Simon Mahns spent $7.74 to burn 6.6 million tokens on inferencing operations.

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