Assertion Supported AI assessment confidence: 95% certainty 4/5 debate potential 2/5

Google's self-driving project pivoted from ADAS to full autonomy in 2013

Dmitri Dolgov · No Priors Ep. 87 | With Co-CEO of Waymo Dmitri Dolgov · Oct 24, 2024 · at 4:28

Dmitri Dolgov, Co-CEO of Waymo, discusses the early product strategy of Google's self-driving project and its decision to abandon driver-assist systems in favor of full autonomy.

0:00 / 0:22exact quote · 22.3s
▶ Watch the full episode on YouTube → 720p mp4 · rendered on demand · StarZero watermark
“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 there. When, you know, we, after working on it for a while and making more progress on kind of the core of the technology, We decided that was not the, you know, right path for us, that we want to go after full autonomy. That was, you know, that made that pivot around 2013.”

quote is from the automated transcript, cleaned for reading: filler sounds and stutters are removed, nothing is rephrased. names can be misheard (the analysis reads context, assessments check outside sources). how →

More from Dmitri Dolgov

Opinion
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…”
Dmitri Dolgov Oct 24, 2024 ▶ 15:58 No Priors Ep. 87 | With Co-CEO of Waymo Dmitri Dolgov
Opinion
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…”
Dmitri Dolgov Oct 24, 2024 ▶ 20:31 No Priors Ep. 87 | With Co-CEO of Waymo Dmitri Dolgov
Insight
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…”
Dmitri Dolgov Dec 26, 2024 ▶ 17:22 No Priors Ep. 95 | Best of 2024
Opinion
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…”
Dmitri Dolgov Oct 24, 2024 ▶ 39:52 No Priors Ep. 87 | With Co-CEO of Waymo Dmitri Dolgov
Insight
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.”
Dmitri Dolgov Oct 24, 2024 ▶ 41:57 No Priors Ep. 87 | With Co-CEO of Waymo Dmitri Dolgov
Assertion Supported
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.”
Dmitri Dolgov Oct 24, 2024 ▶ 12:47 No Priors Ep. 87 | With Co-CEO of Waymo Dmitri Dolgov
Made with StarZero

Turn any episode into a week of clips.

This entire site, over 100 episodes transcribed, diarized, checked and made playable, runs on the StarZero media pipeline. Drop in your own episode and the podcast clipper finds the moments worth sharing, cuts them, captions them, and reframes them for every feed.