Insight
Debating LiDAR versus cameras is just choosing between wavelengths, says Waymo CPO
“Saying you love lidars and hate cameras or vice versa is saying you love one wavelength versus the other wavelength, right? It's not a fundamental thing.”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Panigrahi: Multi-sensor suites outperform camera-only autonomous driving systems
“Does the combination of these sensors position you better than individual. The answer is yes. We can show you that there are situations in which camera will be insufficient.”
Insight
Level 3 versus Level 4 autonomy is like driving versus flying
“No, no, I would say a vast difference even between level three and level four. Huge. It's almost a difference between driving and flying, I would say.”
Insight
Autonomous vehicles require full-stack hardware and software to maintain iteration speed
“And the technology, and it really required the full stack, right? We build the hardware, we build the software, because if you built just the software and waited for somebody else to deliver the hardware, the speed of learning, the speed of iteration that was …”
Disclosure
Panigrahi: Waymo dramatically reduced LiDAR hardware costs over two years
“The amount we have been able to cost down these LiDARs in the last two years is incredible.”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Google's early machine learning infrastructure investments created Waymo's competitive moat
“Really the breakthrough engineering that you sometimes need in AI is just having the raw infrastructure to intake all this data. The amount of data you have to learn to handle to build a really, you know, well-learned algorithm is pretty hard, and that's where…”
Assertion Partly supported
Waymo re-simulations successfully avoided every fatal crash in Phoenix's East Valley
“We took every fatal crash that had occurred and re-simulated and showed that Wemo could avoid that.”
Assertion Supported
Waymo logged zero injury collisions across its first million fully autonomous miles
“In that, we published our full crash text. And there was not a single collision with injury. Not a single one. And only two of them would, you know, meet the standards of a reportability called CISS.”
Prediction Not checkable as stated
Driverless vehicles will be mainstream before today's children reach adulthood
“And by the time he grows up, this will be the more common route.”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Waymo CPO claims company has achieved full autonomy where needed
“We're fully autonomous where we need to be.”
Assertion Supported
Panigrahi: Waymo was first to cross one million fully driverless miles
“We were the first company ever to cross one million fully autonomous miles.”
Assertion Supported
Panigrahi: Waymo operates fully autonomous rides and airport pickups in Phoenix
“And in Phoenix, we'll take you to down to Scottsdale, and when you land at the airport, we will pick you up at the airport. That's where we are in the journey. We're fully autonomous where we need to be.”
Assertion Supported
Panigrahi: Waymo rides require no front-seat human driver or takeover
“Fully autonomous as you can see, nobody in the front seat, no expectation of a human to take over.”
Disclosure
Panigrahi: Waymo suspends autonomous operations in heavy snow
“So, we are in that level four with a certain scope, So right now, if we were to begin heavily snowing in SF, which it has, believe it or not last season, there was a little bit of snow we wouldn't operate it.”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Radar sensors allow Waymo autonomous vehicles to see around corners
“The radars can almost see around corners. Even when the laser and the camera or our human eyes can't.”
Insight
Autonomous vehicles must analyze pedestrian gait and body language to predict intent
“So for example, for that pedestrian, ah, in addition to seeing that they're there, acknowledging, which was this problem one, you got to look at even their gait, their hand movement, their leg movement to anticipate, are they about to take motion?”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Waymo could detect pedestrians in 2019, but struggled with over-conservatism
“And if you're always conservative, which was, you know, say four years ago, it was not like we couldn't detect the pedestrians, we could totally detect them. It was this nuance of, are we being over conservative, assuming they may jump in, hence let's not move…”
Disclosure
Panigrahi: Off-the-shelf LiDAR and radar were unsuited for autonomous driving
“What we found is that the absolute best LiDAR out there, absolute best radar out there was not optimized for the task of autonomous driving. And hence you know we had to build it.”
Assertion Supported
Waymo has logged over 20 million real-world testing miles
“By having driven twenty million plus miles in testing, by having done billions of miles of simulation, we become aware of problem spaces that others may not have discovered yet.”
Insight
Solving San Francisco and Phoenix traffic allows autonomous driving to generalize globally
“Pretty much every good weather city is like a linear combination of those two things, right? So in Los Angeles, Exactly. So you go to West Hollywood, you're much more like a SF style driving. Lots of pedestrians, cyclists, and so on. You go to the LA's you kno…”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Saswat Panigrahi: Waymo uses hybrid specialized deep models, not one single algorithm
“It's definitely many, many deep models. Some very general, extremely deep learning models, and some specialized models to make them really good at some very hard tasks.”
Insight
Saswat Panigrahi: Generative AI and deep models eliminate manual hand-tuning
“One of the powerful things that deep models are telling us As well as Generative AI is telling us is that you actually don't need to hand tune every single thing. It works.”
Assertion Supported
Waymo has driven millions of autonomous miles and billions in simulation
“And by the way, the two million thing that you mentioned, that's just the fully autonomous miles. We have billions in simulation.”
Insight
Panigrahi: Autonomous drop-offs require contextual rules over static logic
“It depends on the context. If you're on a busy street like that, and somebody's going to a business, they would like to be dropped very likely in front of the business they're going to. Whereas if they are getting out of home, going to work, and it's a narrow …”
