Waymo Co-CEO Dmitri Dolgov explains that Waymo has cracked core autonomy and moved to scaling and optimizing the driver.
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…”
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…”
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…”
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…”
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.”
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.”