Dolgov: Off-the-shelf AI models cannot achieve human-beating driverless safety records
Dmitri Dolgov · No Priors Ep. 87 | With Co-CEO of Waymo Dmitri Dolgov · Oct 24, 2024 · at 39:52
Waymo Co-CEO Dmitri Dolgov explains why fine-tuning off-the-shelf generative AI models fails to solve Level 4 autonomous driving.
0:00 / 0:18exact quote · 18.8s
▶ Watch the full episode on YouTube → 720p mp4 · rendered on demand · StarZero watermark
“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 that enough? Is that enough to remove the driver and drive, you know, millions of miles and have a safety record, you know, that is demonstrated better than humans? No, right?”
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
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…”
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…”
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…”
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.”
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.”
Dolgov: Swiss Re study showed 100% bodily injury claim reduction for Waymo
“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…”