The Coffee Test

Sending a machine into a stranger's house to find everything it needs and brew a pot of coffee.

The Coffee Test is a proposed test for general-purpose AI put forward by Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak: a machine must walk into an ordinary American home and figure out how to make coffee on its own, finding the coffee maker, finding the coffee, adding water, finding a cup, and pressing the right buttons to brew it. Unlike the Turing test, which only examines conversation, it requires perception, search, common-sense reasoning, and manipulation in a real, unfamiliar environment, which is why it is often invoked to argue that being able to chat is not the same as being able to get things done. Per Wikipedia, Figure 01 demonstrated autonomously operating a Keurig pod coffee machine in January 2024, and researchers at the University of Edinburgh reportedly had a robot arm make coffee from voice commands with a framework called ELLMER in 2025, but neither was done in a randomly chosen stranger's home, so both still fall short of what the test actually demands.

ExampleA large model can list every step of making coffee, but to pass the Coffee Test, a robot has to rummage through the cabinets of a kitchen it has never seen to find the coffee grounds, and recognize which button to press on that particular machine.

Also called

Wozniak Coffee Test

Related

Physical Turing Test · Embodied AGI · Household Tasks · Open-world · Long-horizon Task · Moravec's Paradox

Sources

Artificial general intelligence - Wikipedia（Tests for human-level AGI 一节） (Chinese)

As of

2025