Driving ability emerged suddenly in frontier models, likely from virtual RL

ben_j_todd · x · 2026-09-24

benjtodd analyzes a model's driving capability: pretraining likely now includes driving and robotics data, possibly even RL — presumably all done virtually, as OpenAI wouldn't be running real cars. Unlike Waymo or Tesla, there was little hand-crafted, driving-specific engineering. Current results aren't great, but the ability emerged suddenly and could be good within a year at this pace.

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Driving ability emerged suddenly in frontier models, likely from virtual RL

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