GPT-6 Astra Drives Toyota Corolla to In-N-Out Drive-Thru

The lunchtime run grew out of a weekend idea. Ramabadran, Mahns, and Gessler had noticed that models like Astra could build complex 3D simulations and wondered whether that skill carried over to the real world. They live in the Bay Area and are exposed to Teslas and Waymos, which they say may have played a role in the choice of test.

The experiment sits alongside a broader push to measure physical reasoning. Andrew Dai, CEO of Elorian AI and previously a researcher at Google DeepMind, says better visual reasoning will open up applications like systems that can tell whether diners are enjoying a meal or robots that function in a home. Elorian and Scale AI recently developed a benchmark, Humanity's Sixth Sense, to measure how well models understand physical scenes. Scale AI's Xingang Guo says most visual AI research is about perception, and the goal was to ask what it would take for a model to understand a scene intuitively.

What the Corolla run shows is narrower than it may sound. The models' driving talents likely emerged from training focused on 3D reasoning rather than any explicit driving instruction, and the trio's own benchmark suggests they remain far from passing a driving test. Whether that gap closes may depend on how much physical understanding improves as multimodal training scales — and on whether the in-context learning the engineers observed can be relied on beyond a parking lot.