Ben Todd: Google Astra Suddenly Gained Car-Driving Ability Without Specialist Training
ben_j_todd · x · 2026-09-23
Ben Todd comments on Google Astra reportedly randomly gaining the ability to drive a car without specialist training.
His analysis: pretraining likely now contains driving and robotics data, maybe some RL too — though presumably all done virtually, without the heavy hand-crafting and deliberate focus that Waymo and Tesla required. Most striking, he notes, is how suddenly the ability emerged.
Related event: GPT-6 Astra Drives a Real Car via openpilot, Claude and Grok Fail(6 posts)→
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