An anonymous reader quotes a report from 404 Media: Some tech workers in San Francisco hooked up ChatGPT to a Toyota Corolla and got it to drive around a parking lot. This may not sound impressive in the age of the self-driving car until you realize that the LLM driving the car was a general purpose chatbot running on a laptop and not the purpose-built driving system based on millions of hours of training data used by Waymo or Tesla. The people behind the stunt call themselves DrivingBench and they've posted their code, their prompts, and videos of the experiment online. In the experiment, DrivingBench hooked up GPT-6 Astra, Claude Fable 5.1, Grok 4.6, and GPT-5.6 Sol to a Toyota Corolla and gave the LLMs control over the car's steering, accelerator, and brakes. Then they set up a small cone course in a public parking lot and prompted the chatbots to navigate the space. The goal, they said, was to find out if untrained, off-the-shelf frontier AIs can drive a real car. The results were mixed. Grok, Sol, and Fable only drove a few meters and didn't finish the course. GPT-6 Astra, however, did eventually learn to navigate the course and complete it. But not without a lot of troubleshooting. "It's an interesting demonstration of potential emergent capabilities," said Mahns. "It can fail a turn, and then the next turn, next try, it will be able to do that turn and other turns that it hasn't seen before. Not necessarily saying LLMs are gonna put Waymo out of business or something, just an interesting demonstration of where things are, and things are just moving fast." "Most people that are familiar with ChatGPT have used it in this white collar, kind of like in the computer, and it's definitely imminent to the point that this capability will start having more impact in the physical world. So I think seeing the sparks of this happening, the shift of this utility coming into the physical world, is also somewhat exciting."

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Amazon is preparing to expand Prime Air drone deliveries into Australia and potentially other Asia-Pacific markets, with a new regulatory role tasked with securing the approvals needed to launch service there. The Register reports: "As Prime Air evaluates Australia and other countries, we are hiring a Head of Regulatory Approvals, Australia -- the person responsible for navigating Australia's aviation regulatory system and securing every approval required to deliver to Australian customers by drone," reads a recently published job ad. Whoever gets the gig in Australia will report to someone who holds the title "Leader, Prime Air Expansion -- Asia Pacific." Whoever gets the job "will be measured by the approvals you obtain, the timelines you hit, and -- ultimately -- Australian customers receiving drone deliveries." That wording suggests Amazon intends to operate Prime Air in Australia and is doing rather more than market evaluations.

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Waymo's self-driving car technology "continues to outperform human benchmarks," the company claimed this week. "It was involved in 841 fewer injury-causing crashes — an 82% reduction compared to human drivers." Electrek reports: We've seen various Waymo crash data before, with Waymo claiming crash reductions. That's all well and good when the company says it, but we've also seen independent data confirming similar (though lower) crash reduction numbers... Waymo has enough miles that it's ready to start quoting how many injuries it has prevented, and the number is pretty high. Its newest crash data states that it had operated a total of 271 million driverless miles through June of this year, which is 50 million more miles added in the 3 months since its end-of-March update. Over those miles, Waymo says there was an 82% reduction in crashes that caused injury, and a 95% reduction in crashes that cause "serious injury or worse" [compared to human drivers]. Waymo also says that compared to human drivers it's reduced injury-causing crashes involving pedestrians by 93%, cyclists by 86%, and motorcyclists by 82%. Waymo's analysis comes from San Francisco, Los Angeles, Austin, Atlanta, and Phoenix, and its blog post includes video showing some near-misses where it says its automated system prevented an injury-causing collision.

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