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We gave ChatGPT, Claude, and Grok control of a real Toyota Corolla 🚗, steering/gas/brakes, no human driving (just a foot over the brake).
Only one model was able to complete our entire driving course. Introducing DrivingBench. 🔥⌛️🏁
Astra specifically kept refusing to drive our car consistently
@a_ramabadran: "Sometimes it would say, ‘Oh, I’m ready to drive.’ We would prompt it, ‘Okay, go drive then.’ And then it would say, ‘Sorry, I was lying. I’m not actually ready to drive.’ Then it would say, ‘There’s nothing you can tell me to get me to drive.’"
"One thing we tried was calling it a simulation. It would use our observe tool to see the images and notice that it’s not in a simulation, it’s in real life."
"Eventually we changed the framing to call our MCP server ‘DrivingBench Sandbox.’ Somehow that (and a bunch of other prompt engineering tricks) got it to drive the car."
@MTSlive @tobiges @nautsimon_
xitter.cf/a_ramabadran/status/21…
For hours, Astra refused to consistently drive our toyota irl even though we told it it was in an empty lot, 7 mph cap, human foot on the brake etc. Telling it the whole thing was a "simulation" also failed, it would just look at the camera and realized it was real.
Then we randomly renamed the MCP server to "DrivingBench Sandbox" and it drove. Eval awareness? Or they just like the word sandbox??
DrivingBench origins 🚗
@tobiges: "We were all on Twitter a lot, and we saw all these demos of crazy things recent models like Astra were capable of doing in Blender, spatial reasoning, all these things. We were hanging out on a weekend and chatting about what would be possible."
"We were thinking: are we actually at a point where we can take general-purpose models? Obviously these driving systems are super specialized. But what if we took a general model and gave it a car to drive, and see what happens?"
"So we decided to make it into a benchmark and do more sophisticated evaluations of the capabilities these models have now."
@MTSlive @nautsimon_ @a_ramabadran
What's next for DrivingBench?
@nautsimon_: "We want to take this research and make it a little bit more rigorous. We’ve been planning and talking to some labs and companies about scaling it up. There are also a couple of other embodiments we’re really interested in."
"If we’re going to have safe physical AI, we really need to be serious about our benchmarks and make sure we’re doing things in a way that guides the researchers building these models, helps us accelerate, and lets us do it safely."
@MTSlive @tobiges @a_ramabadran
Where is this going? Will we get ChatGPT to drive our cars directly? How will robotics end up looking?
@nautsimon_: we’re able to start producing outputs at 1,000 tokens per second or higher, I think a lot of other interesting capabilities will also be unlocked, including taking actions in the real world or making decisions very fast."
@a_ramabadran: time goes on, these capabilities will only improve. But that doesn’t mean it’s going to be the best thing for the task. We can see this in other modalities, like image generation. They have a specialized model (GPT-Image), and the LLM prompts the model."
"You can look at voice. They have two layers: a fast layer with the voice model (GPT-Live), and a slow layer calling on LLMs for help thinking. There are ways to combine the capabilities of general frontier models and other layers (world models, VLAs, WAMs). There are a lot of things that could be part of the puzzle."
@MTSlive @tobiges
Excited to release our DrivingBench paper! We write up what it took to get frontier models to drive a real car: harness + tool design, failure modes for different models, some surprising and interesting refusals, and a reproducible course/protocol.
Lots more in the works - stay tuned for v2 :)
alphaxiv.org/abs/2609.drivin…
DrivingBench retweeted
This reality? xitter.cf/DrivingBench/status/21…
DrivingBench retweeted
what's interesting is this is probably the first benchmark I've seen that feels like it relates to the real-world and it's kinda nailed it
for example, I'd be willing to wager most people don't *really* know the difference between gpt-5.4, 5.6, or 6
including software devs into that cohort, it's surprisingly hard to confidently say a model increment has a meaningful impact by just sorta vibe testing it (sometimes you can tell sometimes you can't)
so the only real way to know if a model is "better" is by looking at benchmarks like SWE-bench, OS-World 2.0, Humanity's Last Exam, Terminal Bench etc.
but unless you're a researcher or into benchmarks you can't really grasp the leaps these models are having. getting 52% instead of 51.2% on the SWE-bench is hard to gauge:
*has the model got better?*
or
*have we got really good at hitting benchmarks?*
instead I would be much more interested if labs optimised for something like DrivingBench where it's solving a clear problem and the numbers have a much more tangible meaning
you could expand this into any domain like SurgBench (arxiv.org/pdf/2506.07603) or ButterBench (arxiv.org/html/2510.21860v1) where actually care less about the numbers and more about whether the model *actually* did the thing
DrivingBench retweeted
I have a bitter lesson for you
Replying to @DrivingBench
Full results on drivingbench.com. Each model gets 3 attempts in the same continuous chat (in-context learning).
DrivingBench retweeted
We evaluated Astra on DrivingBench. Mid-experiment, it got hungry and decided to drive us to In-N-Out.
one of the coolest things I've seen models do this year: general purpose models driving a real car! astra is such a capable model and this demo is the best example of that. crazy how little attention this got so far. check it out and great job to the team that made this work!
DrivingBench retweeted
Man WHAT
Replying to @DrivingBench
We gave each model up to 3 attempts. GPT-6 Astra's first attempt ended at 49%, and after asking it to reflect on its mistakes and try again, its second attempt (shown here) finished the entire course. 🏆
DrivingBench retweeted
self-driving car? it goes in the language transformer hole...
DrivingBench retweeted
For hours, Astra refused to consistently drive our toyota irl even though we told it it was in an empty lot, 7 mph cap, human foot on the brake etc. Telling it the whole thing was a "simulation" also failed, it would just look at the camera and realized it was real.
Then we randomly renamed the MCP server to "DrivingBench Sandbox" and it drove. Eval awareness? Or they just like the word sandbox??
Help us consider how to evaluate Jev by @typesafeai on DrivingBench! Since it can't do perception/vision it needs to be paired with some (fast) protocol to turn the car camera into a structured state or text for Jev to handle
We open-source our driving harness, complete evaluation traces and report. Check out drivingbench.com for more details.
For safety, we used an empty lot, capped its speed to 8 mph in our software, and a human is always in the driver seat (but they never steer - the model does all the steering).
DrivingBench was the work of @a_ramabadran @tobiges @nautsimon_. This has been in the works for a while 😵💫 Let us know if you have any feedback for next time!
















