These Researchers Made AI Drive a Toyota Corolla to Get In-N-Out
Researchers successfully used an OpenAI language model to navigate a Toyota Corolla through a drive-thru, demonstrating the potential for large language models to interact with the physical world. While successful, the experiment highlights the high-stakes risks of applying general-purpose AI to physical tasks.
Why it matters
This experiment marks a shift in AI capabilities from virtual text generation to real-world physical control, raising significant safety and ethical concerns.
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.
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