These Researchers Made AI Drive a Toyota Corolla to Get In-N-Out
Source: Wired ·
Three engineers put GPT, Claude, and Grok in charge of a real car. Only one of them was successful.
From the source
Aditya Ramabadran, Simon Mahns, and Tobias Gessler, three AI engineers at a startup called Axiom , recently fancied In-N-Out Burger for lunch. They weren’t about to drive themselves, though. Sitting in a 2024 Toyota Corolla near the Bay Area restaurant’s drive-thru lane, they opened a laptop and asked OpenAI’s GPT-6 Astra to take the wheel. They linked a chat interface to a server, which was connected to several windscreen-mounted cameras and the car’s power steering system. A safety driver kept one foot above the brake, just in case. The AI model, which is normally tasked with generating text, code, and the odd image, slowly but surely navigated the vehicle up to the take-out window so they could collect their food. “Maybe AGI is here after all,” one of the engineers remarked, referring to artificial general intelligence , the much-ballyhooed idea of machines that can match human intelligence. Self-driving cars are nothing new, of course, but they’re normally operated by algorithms…