‹ BackHN Continuity

Thread

GPT-6 Astra has gained the ability to drive a car

316 points · 251 comments · plurby

  1. valine · · focus · HN ↗
    The bitter lesson is finally coming for the self-driving cars. The vision stack, 3D maps, lane selection grammar, occupancy networks, it’s maybe all about to give way to a single GPT looking at camera feeds and predicting the next steering wheel adjustment.

    It’s mostly a latency problem at this point. The models are too big to run locally, but given that open-weight models like Qwen already exist, an open-weight, low latency equivalent to Astra can’t be too far out.

    1. atonse · · focus · HN ↗
      Tesla's already solved this - their vision model does this phenomenally well.

      And they've demonstrated adding a sidecar LLM to it as well, mostly for these kinds of "read these 3 street signs, what should i do next?" sort of situations.

      1. overgard · · focus · HN ↗
        Totally solved: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;electrek.co&#x2F;2026&#x2F;09&#x2F;15&#x2F;tesla-four-fatal-driver-assist-crashes-july-2026&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;electrek.co&#x2F;2026&#x2F;09&#x2F;15&#x2F;tesla-four-fatal-driver-assis...
        1. Marha01 · · focus · HN ↗
          Anecdotes. Only accident rate per mile driven (compared to human drivers&#x27; rate) is a relevant comparison. I don&#x27;t think that any self-driving system will ever be absolutely perfect (all such complex non-linear systems are to some degree probabilistic and chaotic), but as long as the accident rate is lower than the human accident rate, I would consider it solved.
          1. Mawr · · focus · HN ↗
            Cute, but no. Can&#x27;t compare a self-driving system that&#x27;s only willing to work in a subset of conditions humans drive in, to humans driving in all those conditions.
Open on Hacker News to reply ↗

Unofficial Hacker News client; not affiliated with Y Combinator.