Waymo

“With Waymo they started off in the DARPA Grand Challenge era of self-driving, which is old school, classical computer vision, classical motion planning, and they built this highly validated, robust system that's now on public roads, and it's great. But they kn…”

“Because it is just intractable to maintain a three-D map of every square inch of the planet and update it in real time, and then expect that every time you go somewhere, the map is still accurate on one hand, and also probably unrealistic to assume that every …”

“I think first is I'd say there's alignment amongst Rivian, Tesla, Waymo around the use of AI to train. And so the view that you're building a large scale foundation model, multi-billion parameter model, you're building that with the data flywheel of the vehicl…”

“You know, we are planning to start operating in London and in Tokyo this year.”

“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…”

“It's not like, you know, we estimate, you know, what's happening with the world through cameras, and through radars, and through lighters, and then we compare. No, they're like, there's an encoder for camera, there's an encoder for lighters, and they all go in…”

“We use three different sensing modalities. There's cameras, there's lighters or lasers, and there are radars. You know, those are the primary ones. There are, you know, also microphones, directional, you know, microphone arrays, but those are the primary three…”

“Freeways, for most of the time, not much happens. They're very well structured, because we designed them that way. But there is still that long tail of really complicated stuff that happens where the consequences Of, you know, bed event are much more severe, r…”

“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, …”

“Eventually it will. Absolutely. There's no doubt in my mind. I think it's just a matter of when.”

“And then we're gonna put the six generation Waymo driver on other vehicle forms like the Hyundai Ionic that's coming, you know later in the year.”

“If it is, so cleaning today is a manual process, right? So it'll get flagged in the car, you know, we have fleet management systems, say, hey, you know, car, you know, number, you know, 300, So many needs cleaning and we'll actually on the sensor dome, we're a…”

“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…”

“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…”

“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…”

“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.”

“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 …”

“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.”

“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…”

“Nothing real-time in the cloud, and there are some things that can happen, you know, in the cloud, But they're not required.”

“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…”

“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.”

“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…”

“My lesson from Waymo and on the AI side with TPUs, et cetera, I think to really push the curve well, particularly in areas where you have safety, regulatory, everything, you want the firsthand experience of the product feedback cycle. So I think having first p…”

“Waymo was a great example where I think we increased our investment two to three years ago when the rest of the world got pessimistic on it. When others, some of the people were backing off.”