Waymo co-CEO Dmitri Dolgov breaks down Waymo's commercial fleet operational scale and geographic footprint across the United States.
Opinion
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…”
Insight
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…”
Insight
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…”
Opinion
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…”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
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.”
Prediction Not checkable as stated
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.”