OpenAI's Astra model went for a drive and no one died
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.
At ~$1.17/M tokens, that's significantly discounted from OpenAI's published $10/M input and $50/M output rate.
"It's mostly caching," explained Ramabadran, a member of technical staff at Axiom Math, in an email to The Register.
"Since every turn the chat app re-sends the whole convo (incl. images) to the model, almost all the tokens are repeated context and get billed as cached input ($1/million instead of $10).
The model wrote very very little in the conversations (just small tool calls and some sentences of output/reasoning)." To that $7.74 token bill, add $999 for a comma four driver assistance device running openpilot software, connected to a laptop and the car (via CAN bus), and a mobile phone calling out to xAI servers hosting GPT-6 Astra.
Even without the hardware, Astra would be a pricey way to drive even if network latency risks could be overcome.
5News aggregated this summary from the outlet’s public feed. The full article, with all the context, is on www.theregister.com — the content belongs to The Register.
