The Ledger
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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…”
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: 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 vehicles rely on cameras, lidars, and radars for 360-degree vision
“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…”
Dolgov: Waymo requires zero real-time cloud connectivity for driving inference
“Nothing real-time in the cloud, and there are some things that can happen, you know, in the cloud, But they're not required.”
Dolgov: Freeway autonomous driving is dominated by high-speed edge-case severity
“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…”
Dolgov: Waymo Gen-6 Driver Will Expand to Hyundai Ioniq in 2026
“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.”
Waymo Fuses Camera, LiDAR, and Radar Encoders Jointly Rather Than Comparing Outputs
“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…”
Waymo co-CEO: Cleaning and charging at depots remain manual processes
“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…”