Waymo

“I think, personally, Tesla is ahead of Waymo, and I know it doesn't look like that, but I'm still very bullish on Tesla and its self-driving program. I think that Tesla has a software problem, and I think Waymo has a hardware problem, is the way I put it, and …”

“The architecture is an enabler, but really to make it work at the level that we care about, you need like everything around it. The data engine, the whole, you know, flywheel of, you know, training the system, evaluating it. And you kind of have to think about…”

“The complexity is in the long tail of the many, many, many nines. And you don't see that if you go, you know for a prototype, if you go for, you know, a driver assist system and this is where, you know, we've been spending all of our, that's the only hard part…”

“And actually our first product that we thought was going to be viable was, you know, what nowadays you would call kind of an advanced driver system, right? And we had some expectations of, you know, a small number of years that it would take for us to get ther…”

“You know, a 100,000 trips per week, more than a million miles per week, and growing, you know, exponentially.”

“We are very focused on the, you know, trillions of miles where we can have the positive benefits. So for us like I focus, I think focus is very, very important. So we are being very, you know, laser focused on driving.”

“And then they're a little bit different, but if we're talking about full autonomy, maybe there's second order differences, But the first order of complexity is still there. You can, ah, like the, if you think about, you know, the core, the heart of the problem…”

“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…”

“We are scaling exponentially. It took us about three months. To get from 50,000 miles to a 100,000 miles, right?”

“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…”

“So for airbag, you know, deployment type collisions, we're about a factor of six better than human drivers.”

“In fact just in the last couple of days, we announced something that we're doing where we are incentivizing people to take Waymos in the cities where we operate to public transit hubs, and then, you know, everybody benefits.”

“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…”

“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.”

“Primarily it's the latter. So we've always, you know, our playbook has been to you know, go about it responsibly and gradually and earn trust every step of the way and have this transparent dialogue. Again, this is a very new thing, new technology, new product…”

“You might plateau in the right place for a driver assist system. You will plateau at the wrong place for a fully autonomous system.”

“Every generation of the hardware, you know, would increase capability, but also simplify drastically. And then the cost comes down, you know, every generation. So that was true, you know, for the previous generations we made a big jump from the you know, the p…”

“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…”

“Right hailing is the main one that we're focusing on. So we're, you know, focused on technology. We're focused on the product. We are learning from our users. We're every day, we're earning trust. And we're setting up the ecosystem of, you know, partnerships i…”

“The way we think about it in terms of the development and evaluation of the driver is kind of in the space of the operating domain, not necessarily areas or zip codes. And then you kind of take cities and you map that to the operating domain and you deploy it,…”

“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…”

“To be fair, Elon nailed it from a business model perspective. He's been making billions of dollars of profit while developing self-driving cars, whereas everyone else has been burning billions of dollars to try to get to basically the same point.”

“Companies like Waymo are growing or are expanding, I think much more slowly than they should based on the merits and the safety of their technology.”

“The Waymo stuff is super impressive, but it is worth putting an asterisk. The business model hasn't been figured out yet. The Tesla business model has been figured out.”

“And I think, like, that type of AI experience is, I think, is more fundamentally important than even just getting, you know, Waymo going, or just getting out to, because that's the hidden part of the economy.”

“On a Waymo, that's tens of thousands of miles.”

“I think we're probably Waymo's biggest employer outside of Waymo, and Cruise and Tesla, all, all of these organizations.”

“I do think that on the topic of robots, the biggest trend perhaps, or one of the biggest trends of 20, 26, 100% will be that self-driving will really begin to matter. And that'll be both in terms of your own car. It'll be in terms of Waymo and Tesla cabs.”

“We're going to go, you know, not as heavy as let's say a Waymo on perception, but heavier than let's say Tesla to build a really robust data platform on a vehicle by vehicle basis.”