Dmitri Dolgov
Co-CEO, Waymo. On 4 shows, 4 appearances. The Shows tab opens the full record on each.
executiveengineerscientist@dmitri_dolgov ↗LinkedIn ↗waymo.com ↗Wikipedia ↗
Dmitri Dolgov is a pioneer in autonomous vehicle technology who co-founded Google's Self-Driving Car Project in 2009. He serves as Co-CEO of Waymo, leading the development and deployment of the company's autonomous driving technology.
4shows
4appearances
51statements
21resolved
19supported
0contradicted
90%fully supported
Everything Dmitri Dolgov said on any show that made the record, most notable first. Each card names its show and opens the statement there.
Dolgov: Pure pixels-in end-to-end models cannot easily achieve scale and safety
“If you think about this entire ecosystem of the driver, the simulator, the critic, if that's all you do, pixels in, trajectories out, it becomes very difficult to do all of those three and achieve the high level of safety and performance that we require, and i…”
Dolgov: Driver assist systems and full autonomy are fundamentally different problems
“And talk about the technology, and I see it just as fundamentally two different problems. There's driver assist systems, and then there is full autonomy. And I think it's deceptive to think of them as kind of incremental you know, on one spectrum of complexity…”
Waymo's autonomous driving technology is fundamentally centered on AI, not hardware
“It's all about AI. Full stop. Like we talked about, you know, a few big breakthroughs that allowed us to get to where we are today. You know, content, transformers, big Ness now, you know, most recently kind of combining the Waymo AI with the congenital knowle…”
Dolgov: Camera-only systems are not safe enough for full autonomy
“Same, same for us. We can, you know, take something away and we can answer that question. Like, is the performance, can you still drive? Of course. Is the performance good enough? For full autonomy, and is it good enough for our bar of readiness and safety? An…”
Dolgov: Autonomous vehicles require closed-loop RLFT, not just imitation learning
“And if all you did was kind of observing how other people drive when you trained the system, maybe observing, you know, just passively how people drive and how they interact maybe also, you know, driving the car yourself and then using imitative learning to tr…”
Dolgov: Waymo core driving technology has no remaining foundational gaps
“I would say that we've clearly moved past the stage of scientific research and kind of deep core technology development to this new phase of accelerated global scaling and deployment. So, you know, we still have work to do, right? But I don't see today any lim…”
Dolgov: Waymo Gen-6 Hardware Costs a Fraction of Gen-5
“It is very different from the fifth generation. It is simpler. It is more capable. It is much lower cost. It's thinking a fraction of the cost is, you know, comparable to what you would get like a fancy ADA system.”
Dolgov: Waymo driver tech will eventually reach every US USPS address
“Eventually it will. Absolutely. There's no doubt in my mind. I think it's just a matter of when.”
Dolgov: AV complexity lies in long-tail reliability, not prototypes or ADAS
“The hard problem, and it's kind of like that, the early part of the curve has been getting like, you know, even steeper and steeper, but that's not where the complexity is. The complexity is in the long tail of the many, many, many nines. And you don't see tha…”
Dolgov: Off-the-shelf AI models cannot achieve human-beating driverless safety records
“The power of transformers, the power of realism is mind-blowing, right? So with just a little bit of effort, you get something on the road, and it works. You can, you know, drive, I don't know, 1000 of miles, and we just, it will blow your mind. But then is th…”
Pure imitation learning will plateau short of full autonomy safety standards
“You might plateau in the right place for a driver assist system. You will plateau at the wrong place for a fully autonomous system.”
Dolgov: Autonomous taxis in most major US cities within 10 years
“I definitely agree with the latter, and I would not dismiss the former. 10 years is a, you know, reasonably long time, and, you know, things can happen nonlinearly.”
Dolgov: Waymo distills driver, simulator, and critic from one foundation model
“The way we think about the, you know, building the Waymo driver it starts with a large off-board foundation model. I can imagine, you know, building a big model that understands how the physical world works and understands the, Important properties of what it …”
Dolgov: Autonomous AI relies more on metrics and data than architecture
“And of course, you know, people like to talk about architectures, but architecture, you know, is important, but really a lot of it comes down primarily to your metrics, to your evaluation mechanisms, to, you know, all of the training recipes, and of course, ne…”
Dolgov: Waymo augments end-to-end models with structured world representations
“So this is where augmenting that learned representation, those learned embeddings from the encoder decoder with that, you know, more, you know, structured representation is what we do, and we find that this kind of gives us additional knobs to simulate, you kn…”
Waymo plans to start operating in London and Tokyo in 2026
“You know, we are planning to start operating in London and in Tokyo this year.”
Waymo Co-CEO: Gen-6 Custom Robotaxi Is Launching in 2026
“It's, you know, we're not, it's not open to the, you know, the public yet. But, you know, I took a ride in it the other day, fully autonomously, and that's coming this year.”
Dolgov: Waymo LiDAR bounced under bus to detect occluded pedestrian
“What actually turned out was happening is that our peripheral lighters bounce under the bus, and there was just a little bit of very, very noisy reflection of the movement of the person's feet. That was enough for the AI models that, hey, I likely there's a pe…”
Waymo runs 3,000 cars delivering 500k rides and 4M miles weekly
“We have about 3000 cars on the roads. We're doing about half a million rides per week. It, that translates to about, you know, over four million fully autonomous miles per week. We are operating in a fully autonomous mode in 11 cities in the US and 10 of those…”
Dolgov: Waymo may serve low-density areas via privately owned vehicles
“And this is where, you know, a personally owned vehicle that is equipped with the Waymo driver is maybe, you know, how you will see it materialized.”
Dolgov: Each additional nine of AV reliability requires 10x more effort
“It's deceptively easy to get started, but it is super hard to go, you know, the full distance and, you know, the number of knives, right? That you have to, like, there's, The standard, you know, engineering rule of thumb that, you know, every next nine takes, …”
Dolgov: Waymo experiences 6x fewer airbag-deployment collisions than humans
“So for airbag, you know, deployment type collisions, we're about a factor of six better than human drivers.”
Dolgov: Swiss Re study showed 100% bodily injury claim reduction for Waymo
“We have done a study with Swiss RE, the global kind of thing, the biggest global ratio in the world. And we partnered with them, we shared the data, they've done the analysis, and they found that, you know, for damage, We had about a four X reduction versus th…”
Dolgov: Waymo has achieved autonomous driving quality and shifted to optimization
“So far we have, you know, achieved Good quality of the driver. We have built all the machinery to evaluate it and know what it takes. So now for us, it's an optimization, right? It's a, it's an optimization, simplification.”
One line per show, most statements first. The link opens Dmitri's full record on that show: the calibration, argument clarity, speaking style and every statement made there.
| Show | Role there | Eps | Statements | Record | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
 CHEEKY PINTLEDGER | Co-CEO, Waymo | 1 | 21 | 100% 6/6 | full record on Cheeky Pint → |
 NO PRIORSLEDGER | Co-CEO, Waymo | 2 | 20 | 100% 5/5 | full record on No Priors → |
 a16zLEDGER | Co-CEO, Waymo | 0 | 0 | 50% 2/4 | full record on the a16z Podcast → |
 HOW I BUILT THISLEDGER | Co-CEO, Waymo | 1 | 10 | 100% 6/6 | full record on How I Built This → |