The 20-year journey to fully autonomous cars with Dmitri Dolgov of Waymo

Waymo is now doing nearly 500,000 rides a week across 10 cities. Co-CEO Dmitri Dolgov came to the pub to discuss how they moved from scientific research to massive global scaling. He gives a masterclass on the sensor stack (and why you still need Lidar), how they use "Simulation" and "Critic" models to train the AI, and why he believes cars that require human supervision will never naturally evolve into robotaxis. They also cover the new custom-built vehicle that feels like a living room, the economics of ride-hailing in rural Alaska, and the "Russian math nerd" diaspora that seems to run the UK tech scene.

Timestamps

(00:00:22) Russia

(00:02:51) Waymo architecture

(00:09:59) Why now?

(00:19:46) Driving nuance

(00:29:37) Stripe Agentic Commerce Suite

(00:30:17) Hardware

(00:40:20) Emergent behavior

(00:46:36) Scaling

(00:57:56) Google

Article:

EMMA: End-to-End Multimodal Model for Autonomous Driving – Waymo Research: https://waymo.com/research/emma/