The Ledger
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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…”
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…”
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…”
Dolgov: Waymo has achieved autonomous driving quality and shifted to optimization
“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.”
Dolgov: Consumer and community trust is the main bottleneck to scaling Waymo
“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…”
Dolgov: Trucking and delivery AVs cannot bypass full autonomy's core complexity
“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…”
Dolgov: Autonomous vehicle complexity lies entirely in long-tail reliability 'nines'
“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…”
Google's self-driving project pivoted from ADAS to full autonomy in 2013
“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…”
Dolgov: Waymo completes over 100,000 trips and one million miles weekly
“You know, a 100,000 trips per week, more than a million miles per week, and growing, you know, exponentially.”
Dolgov: Waymo evaluates autonomy across operating domains rather than zip codes
“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,…”
AI model architectures are only enablers without the surrounding data flywheel
“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…”
Dolgov: Waymo remains laser-focused on autonomous driving over general robotics
“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.”
Waymo doubled weekly autonomous miles from 50,000 to 100,000 in three months
“We are scaling exponentially. It took us about three months. To get from 50,000 miles to a 100,000 miles, right?”
Dolgov: Waymo's sixth-gen hardware focuses on simplification and cost reduction
“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…”
Waymo focuses on robotaxis but plans future trucking and delivery deployments
“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…”