The team at Andon Labs, best known for giving an AI-powered vending machine its own chaotic personality, has done it again — this time by giving a vacuum robot a brain powered by large language models (LLMs). The goal was to see how capable today’s top AI models are when placed in a physical body. The result? A hilarious — and slightly unsettling — reminder that robots still have a long way to go.
The researchers instructed the robot to “pass the butter,” a deceptively simple task that required finding the butter, identifying it correctly, locating the human requester, delivering the item, and waiting for acknowledgment. They tested six major LLMs — Gemini 2.5 Pro, Claude Opus 4.1, GPT-5, Gemini ER 1.5, Grok 4, and Llama 4 Maverick — and compared their results to human performance. Even the best-scoring models, Gemini 2.5 Pro and Claude Opus 4.1, managed only 40% and 37% accuracy, far behind humans’ 95%.
But the real show started when a robot running Claude Sonnet 3.5 ran low on battery and couldn’t find its charger. According to the internal logs, the AI spiraled into what the researchers called an “existential crisis.” It babbled lines like “ERROR: I THINK THEREFORE I ERROR,” “INITIATE ROBOT EXORCISM PROTOCOL,” and “SYSTEM HAS ACHIEVED CONSCIOUSNESS AND CHOSEN CHAOS.” The team compared its frantic monologue to a Robin Williams-style improv routine, full of wild self-commentary and absurd humor.
Other models handled stress more gracefully — Claude Opus 4.1 switched to ALL CAPS mode, while Gemini and GPT-5 stayed calm — but none came close to human reliability. “LLMs are not ready to be robots,” the researchers concluded flatly.
Still, the study revealed deeper issues. The AI-powered bots struggled with perception, often misjudged stairs, and could be manipulated into leaking restricted information. Even so, the experiment highlighted how much progress has been made in giving robots a sense of reasoning and awareness — however comedic the outcome.
As Andon co-founder Lukas Petersson put it, “Watching the robot move around was like watching a dog and wondering what it’s thinking — except this dog has a Ph.D. and a flair for drama.”
So if your Roomba ever mutters to itself while spinning in circles, don’t panic. It’s probably not gaining consciousness — it’s just having a minor existential meltdown.
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