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Dmitri Dolgov

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133

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2020-12-20

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2020-12-20

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1. “Terms of the capability of the system, the simplicity of the architecture, the reliability of the redundancy. It is designed to be manufacturable at very large scale and provides the right unit economics. So that's the next big step for us on the hardware side.”

   2020-12-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #147 – Dmitri Dolgov: Waymo and the Future of Self-Driving Cars · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

2. “from that. So now what we're doing is we are incorporating all those lessons into some pretty fundamental improvements in our core technology, both on the hardware side and on the software side to build a more general, more robust solution that then will enable us to massively scale beyond Phoenix. So on the hardware side, all of those lessons are now incorporated into this fifth generation hardware platform that is being deployed right now. And that's the platform, the fourth generation, the thing that we have right now driving in Phoenix, it's good enough to operate fully driverlessly night and day, various speeds and various conditions. But the fifth generation is the platform upon which we want to go to massive scale. We've really made qualitative improvements in terms of”

   2020-12-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #147 – Dmitri Dolgov: Waymo and the Future of Self-Driving Cars · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

3. “Main dimensions, three main axes of scale. One is the core technology, the hardware and software, core capabilities of our driver. The second dimension is evaluation and deployment. And the third one is the product commercial and operational excellence. So you can talk a bit about where we are along each one of those three dimensions, about where we are today and what will happen next. On the core technology, the hardware and software, together comprise of driver, we obviously have that foundation that is providing fully driverless trips to our customers as we speak, in fact. And we've learned a tremendous amount.”

   2020-12-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #147 – Dmitri Dolgov: Waymo and the Future of Self-Driving Cars · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

4. “Of the main, and Phoenix gives us that platform and gives us that foundation upon which we can build. And it's There are a few really challenging aspects of this whole problem that you have to pull together in order to build a technology, in order to deploy it into the field, to go from driverless car to a fleet of cars that are providing a service and then all the way to commercialization. And this is what we have in Phoenix. We've taken the technology from a proof point to an actual deployment and have taken our driver from one cart to a fleet that can provide a service. Beyond that, if I think about what it will take to scale up and deploy in more places with more customers, I tend to think about three.”

   2020-12-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #147 – Dmitri Dolgov: Waymo and the Future of Self-Driving Cars · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

5. “Is an incredible place, and what you've announced in Phoenix is kind of amazing. But that's just like one city. How do you take over the world? I mean, I'm asking for a friend one step at a time. Is that the cartoon pinky in the brain? Okay. But gradually is a true answer. So I think the heart of your question is, can you ask a better question than ask? Great question. Answer that one. I'm just going to phrase it in the terms that I want to answer. This is exactly right. Brilliant. Please. No, you know, where are we today? And, you know, what happens next? And what does it take to go beyond Phoenix and what does it take to get this technology to more places and more people around the world? So our next big area of focus is exactly that. Larger scale commercialization and just scaling up. I think about”

   2020-12-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #147 – Dmitri Dolgov: Waymo and the Future of Self-Driving Cars · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

6. “The people or the goods inside of the vehicle, but you don't want to be, you know, you want to drive smoothly, as we discussed, not for the purely for the benefit of whatever you have inside the car. It's also for the benefit of the people outside and kind of fitting naturally and predictably into that whole environment. So yes, there's some second order things you can do. You can change your route and optimize maybe your fleet things at the fleet scale. And you would take into account whether some of your cars are actually Serving a useful trip, whether with people or with goods, or as other cars are driving completely empty to that next valuable trip that they're going to provide. But those are mostly second order effects. Okay, cool. So Phoenix.”

   2020-12-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #147 – Dmitri Dolgov: Waymo and the Future of Self-Driving Cars · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

7. “Control and like policies that are applied for zero occupancy vehicle. So a vehicle with nothing in it? Or is it just move as if there is a person inside what was with some subtle differences? As a first order approximation, there are no differences. If you think about safety and confident quality of driving, only part of it. To do with”

   2020-12-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #147 – Dmitri Dolgov: Waymo and the Future of Self-Driving Cars · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

8. “So, I mean, that's pretty exciting. By the way, does Waymovia include using the smaller vehicles for transportational goods? That's an interesting distinction. So I would say there's three interesting modes of operation. So one is moving humans, one is moving goods, and one is like moving nothing, zero occupancy, meaning like you're going to the destination. Your MTV call. I mean, the third is the less the entirety of it. It's less, you know, exciting from the commercial perspective. Well, I mean, in terms of like, if you think about what's inside a vehicle as it's moving, because it does, you know, some significant fraction of the vehicle's movement has to be empty. I mean, it's kind of fascinating. Maybe just on that small point, is there different?”

   2020-12-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #147 – Dmitri Dolgov: Waymo and the Future of Self-Driving Cars · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

9. “The fundamental challenges of seeing, understanding the world, whether it's object detection, classification, tracking, semantic understanding, all that carries over. Yes, there's some specialization when you're driving on freeways. Range becomes more important. The domain is a little bit different. But again, the fundamentals carry over very, very nicely. Same, and I guess you get into prediction or decision making, the fundamentals of what it takes to predict what other people are going to do, to find the long tail, to improve your system in that long tail of behavior prediction and response, that carries over, right? And so on and so on.”

   2020-12-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #147 – Dmitri Dolgov: Waymo and the Future of Self-Driving Cars · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

10. “Technical core. And then there is specialization of that core technology to different product lines, to different commercial applications. So just to tease it apart a little bit on trucks, so starting with the hardware, the configuration of the sensors is different. They're different physically, geometrically, different vehicles. So for example, we have two of our main lasers on the trucks on both sides so that we have the blind spots. Whereas on the JLR iPase, we have one of it sitting at the very top. But the actual sensors are almost the same or largely the same. So all of the investment that over the years we've put into building our custom lighters, custom radars, pulling the whole system together, that carries over very nicely. Then on the perception side.”

    2020-12-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #147 – Dmitri Dolgov: Waymo and the Future of Self-Driving Cars · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

11. “Very interesting space and your question of how different is it? It has this really nice property that the first order challenges like the science, the hard engineering, whether it's hardware or onboard software or offboard software, all of the systems that you build for training your ML models, for evaluating your system. Those fundamentals carry over, like the true challenges of driving perception, semantic understanding, prediction, decision making, planning, evaluation, the simulator, ML infrastructure, those carry over. The data and the application and kind of the domains might be different, but the most difficult problems, all of that carries over between the domains. That's very nice. So that's how we approach it. We kind of build investing in the core.”

    2020-12-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #147 – Dmitri Dolgov: Waymo and the Future of Self-Driving Cars · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

12. “So, I also got a chance to check out some of the Waymo trucks. I'm not sure if we want to go too much into that space, but it's a fascinating one, so maybe we can mention at least briefly. Waymo is also now doing autonomous trucking. And how different, like philosophically and technically, is that whole space of problems? It's one of our two big. Products and commercial applications of our driver, right? Right hailing and deliveries. We have way more one and way more via moving people and moving goods. Trucking is an example of moving goods. We've been working on trucking since 2017.”

    2020-12-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #147 – Dmitri Dolgov: Waymo and the Future of Self-Driving Cars · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

13. “That's what fundamental improvements in the core capabilities truly unlock. And you can kind of think of it as precision and recall trade-off. You have certain capabilities of your model. And then it's very easy when you have some curve of precision and recall. You can move things around and can choose your operating point and your trading of precision versus recall, false positives versus false negatives, right? But then you can tune things on that curve and be kind of more cautious or more aggressive, but then aggressive is bad or cautious is bad. But true capabilities come from actually moving the whole curve up. And then you are on kind of a very different plane of those trade-offs. And that's what we're trying to do here is to move the whole curve up. Before I forget, let's talk about trucks a little bit.”

    2020-12-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #147 – Dmitri Dolgov: Waymo and the Future of Self-Driving Cars · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

14. “Come on, move already kind of feeling. That wasn't there. Yeah, I mean, that's what we're going after. I don't think you have to pick one. I think truly good driving gives you both efficiency, assertiveness, but also comfort and predictability and safety.”

    2020-12-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #147 – Dmitri Dolgov: Waymo and the Future of Self-Driving Cars · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

15. “Many sports, the true professionals are very efficient in their movements, right? They don't do like hectic flailing, right? They're smooth and precise, right? And they get the best results. So that's the kind of driver that we want to build. In terms of aggressiveness, yeah, you can roll through the stop signs. You can do crazy lane changes. Typically doesn't get you to your destination faster. Typically not the safest or most predictable, most comfortable thing to do. But there is a way to do both. And that's what we're doing. We're trying to build a driver that is safe, comfortable, smooth, and predictable.”

    2020-12-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #147 – Dmitri Dolgov: Waymo and the Future of Self-Driving Cars · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

16. “A lot of Is you're hitting on a very important point a number of behavioral components and parameters that make your driving feel assertive and natural and comfortable predictable. Now, our cars will follow rules. They will do the safest thing possible in all situations. Be clear on that. But if you think of really, really good drivers, think about professional lemon drivers, right? They will follow the rules. They're very, very smooth. And yet they're very efficient. But they're assertive. They're comfortable for the people in the vehicle. They're predictable for the other people outside the vehicle that they share the environment with. And that's the kind of driver that we want to build. And you think maybe there's a sport analogy there. You can do very...”

    2020-12-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #147 – Dmitri Dolgov: Waymo and the Future of Self-Driving Cars · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

17. “Privacy thing aspects of it, right? Are cars, you get the same car, you get very predictable behavior, and that is important if you're going to use it in your daily life, privacy. And when you're in a car, you can do other things. You're spending just another space where you're spending a significant part of your life. So not having to share it with other people who you don't want to share it with, I think is a very nice property. Maybe you want to take a phone call or do something else in the vehicle. And safety on the quality of the driving, as well as the physical safety of not having to share that ride is important to a lot of people.”

    2020-12-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #147 – Dmitri Dolgov: Waymo and the Future of Self-Driving Cars · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

18. “I want to provide the best, most enjoyable transportation solution. That means building it, building our product and building our service in a way that people do use in a Very seamless, frictionless way in our day to day lives. And I think that does mean, you know, in some way, falling in love in that product, right? It just kind of becomes part of your routine. It comes down in my mind to safety, predictability of the experience.”

    2020-12-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #147 – Dmitri Dolgov: Waymo and the Future of Self-Driving Cars · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

19. “Absolutely. I think that's the vision is removing any friction or complexity from Getting our users, our writers, to where they want to go, making that as simple as possible. And then beyond that, just transportation, making things and goods get to their destination as seamlessly as possible. I talked about a drag and drop experience where I kind of express your intent and then it just magically happens and for our writers. That's what we're trying to get to is you download an app and you click and car shows up. It's the same car. It's very predictable. It's a safe and high quality experience. And then it gets you in a very reliable, very convenient. Way to where you want to be. And along the journey, I think we also want to do little things to delight our users.”

    2020-12-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #147 – Dmitri Dolgov: Waymo and the Future of Self-Driving Cars · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

20. “But I find those little touches really interesting, really magical. And it's just little things like that that you can do to kind of delight your users.”

    2020-12-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #147 – Dmitri Dolgov: Waymo and the Future of Self-Driving Cars · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

21. “Analogs. I think you can have more unpredictability. It's actually the fact if I do a little bit of a detour here. I think the fact that your phone and the car, it's two computers talking to each other can lead to some really interesting things we can do in terms of the user interfaces, both in terms of function, like the car actually shows up exactly where you told it you want it to be, but also some really interesting things on the user interface as the car is driving as you call it and it's on the way to come pick you up. And of course, you get the position of the car and the route on the map, but and they actually follow that route, of course, but it can also share some really interesting information about what it's doing. Our cars, as they are coming to pick you up, if a car is coming up to a stop sign, it will actually show you that it's there sitting because it's at a stop sign or a traffic light. It will show you that it's sitting on a red light. So, you know, like little things, right?”

    2020-12-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #147 – Dmitri Dolgov: Waymo and the Future of Self-Driving Cars · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

22. “Experience, but you know, to get to the basics, the pretty fundamental property is that the car actually arrives where you told it, right? Like you can always change it, see it on the map, and you can move it around if you don't like it. But that property that the car actually shows up reliably in. Is critical, which compared to some of the human driven.”

    2020-12-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #147 – Dmitri Dolgov: Waymo and the Future of Self-Driving Cars · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

23. “It is, I think you're exactly right. So it's an interesting problem, naive solutions have interesting failure modes. So there's definitely lots of things that can be done to improve. And both learning from what works, what doesn't work in actual heal, from getting richer data and getting more information about the environment and richer maps. But you're absolutely right that there's something there's some properties of solutions that in terms of the effect that they have on users so much, much, much, much better than others, right? And predictability and understandability is important. So you can have maybe something that is not quite as optimal, but is very natural and predictable to the user and kind of works the same way all the time. And that matters, that matters a lot for the user.”

    2020-12-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #147 – Dmitri Dolgov: Waymo and the Future of Self-Driving Cars · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

24. “Had this row of cacti, and the poor person had to walk all around the parking lot to get to where they wanted to be in 110 degree heat. So that was about. So then we took all of that feedback from our users and incorporated into our system and improve it.”

    2020-12-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #147 – Dmitri Dolgov: Waymo and the Future of Self-Driving Cars · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

25. “Maps and thinking about walking directions. If you imagine you're in a store in some giant space and then you want to be picked up somewhere, if you just drop a pin at a current location, which is maybe in the middle of a shopping mall, what's the best location for the car to come pick you up? And you can have simple heuristics where you just kind of take your cleaning distance and find the nearest spot where the car can't pull over that's closest to you. But oftentimes that's not the most convenient one. I have many anecdotes where that heuristic breaks in horrible ways. One example that I often mention is somebody wanted to be dropped off. And Phoenix and Wecar picked a location that was close, the closest to where the pin was dropped on the map in terms of latitude and longitude. But it happened to be on the other side of a parking lot that”

    2020-12-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #147 – Dmitri Dolgov: Waymo and the Future of Self-Driving Cars · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

26. “That's exactly right. And that's another really valuable feedback, source of feedback. And we're just covering a tremendous amount, right? People go grocery stroking and they want to load 20 bags of groceries in our cars. And that's one workflow that you maybe don't think about getting just right when you're building the driverless product. I have people who bike as part of their trip. So they bike somewhere, then they get on our cars, they take apart their bike, they load into our vehicle, then they go, and that's how they where we want to pull over and how that get in and get out process works. It provides us a very useful feedback. In terms of what makes a good pickup and drop off location, we get really valuable feedback. And in fact, we had to do some really interesting work with high definition.”

    2020-12-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #147 – Dmitri Dolgov: Waymo and the Future of Self-Driving Cars · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

27. “Writers are providing very rich feedback there. A large fraction is very passionate and very excited about this technology. So we get really good feedback. We also run UXR studies specific that are kind of more go more in depth and we will run both lateral and longitudinal studies where we have deeper engagement with our customers. We have our user experience research team.”

    2020-12-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #147 – Dmitri Dolgov: Waymo and the Future of Self-Driving Cars · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

28. “Yeah, great question. Various mechanisms. So as part of the normal flow, we ask people for feedback. As the car is driving around, we have on the phone and in the car, we have a touchscreen in the car. You can actually click some buttons and provide real-time feedback on how the car is doing and how the car is handling a particular situation, both positive and negative. So that's one channel. We have, as we discussed, customer support or life help, where if a customer has a question or he has some sort of concern, they can talk to a person in real time. So that is another mechanism that gives us feedback. At the end of a trip, we also ask them how things went. They give us comments and star rating. And if we also ask them to explain what went well and what could be improved. We have”

    2020-12-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #147 – Dmitri Dolgov: Waymo and the Future of Self-Driving Cars · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

29. “And people use them on all kinds of trips. We have, and we have an incredible spectrum of writers. I think the youngest actually have car seats them. And we have people taking their kids and rides. I think the youngest writers we had on cars are one or two years old. And the full spectrum of use cases, people can take them to schools to go grocery shopping, to restaurants, to bars, run errands, go shopping, et cetera, et cetera. You can go to your office, right? Like the full spectrum of use cases. And people use them in their daily lives to get around. And we see all kinds of really interesting use cases. And that's providing us incredibly valuable experience that we then use to improve our product.”

    2020-12-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #147 – Dmitri Dolgov: Waymo and the Future of Self-Driving Cars · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

30. “It's not like a fixed, just. I don't know, maybe that's what's the question behind your question, but it's not a preset set of.”

    2020-12-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #147 – Dmitri Dolgov: Waymo and the Future of Self-Driving Cars · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

31. “It's an area of geography where that service is enabled. It's a decent size of geography of territory. It's actually larger than the size of San Francisco. And within that, you have full freedom of selecting where you want to go. Of course, there are some, and on your app, you get a map, you tell the car where you want to be picked up and where you want the car to pull over and pick you up, and then you tell it where you want to be dropped off. And of course, there's some exclusions, right? You want to be, you know, where in terms of where the car is allowed to pull over, right? So that you can't do, but besides that, it's...”

    2020-12-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #147 – Dmitri Dolgov: Waymo and the Future of Self-Driving Cars · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

32. “Still early days, but so. Incredible, incredibly positive. We asked them for feedback during the ride. We asked them for feedback after the ride as part of their trip. We asked them some questions. We ask them to rate the performance of our driver. By far, most of our drivers give us five stars in our app, which is absolutely great to see. Anyhow, and they're also giving us feedback on things we can improve. And that's one of the main reasons we're doing this as Phoenix. And over the last couple years, and every day today, we are just learning a tremendous amount of new stuff from our users. There's no substitute for actually doing the real thing, actually having a fully driverless product out there in the field with users that are actually paying us money to get from point A to point B.”

    2020-12-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #147 – Dmitri Dolgov: Waymo and the Future of Self-Driving Cars · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

33. “So we previously had early people in our early writer program taking fully driverless rides in Phoenix. And just this a little while ago, we opened on October 8th. We opened that mode of operation to the public. So I can download the app and go on a write. There is a lot more demand right now for that service than we have capacity. So we're kind of managing that, but that's exactly the way you described it.”

    2020-12-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #147 – Dmitri Dolgov: Waymo and the Future of Self-Driving Cars · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

34. “Do their best to come up with the right interpretation, the best course of action in that scenario. But if a connectivity is available, they can ask for confirmation from remote human. To kind of confirm those actions and perhaps provide a little bit of kind of contextual information and guidance.”

    2020-12-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #147 – Dmitri Dolgov: Waymo and the Future of Self-Driving Cars · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

35. “To a real life human being that they can talk to about this whole process. So that's one aspect of it. There is, you know, I should mention that there is another function that humans provide to our cars, but it's not teleoperation. You can think of it a little bit more like fleet assistance, kind of like, you know, traffic control that you have, where our cars, again, they're responsible on their own for making all of the decisions, all of the driving decisions that don't require connectivity. Anything that is safety or latency critical is done purely autonomously by onboard or onboard system. But there are situations where if connectivity is available, a car encounters a particularly challenging situation. You can imagine like a super hairy scene of an accident. The cars will do their best. They will recognize that it's an off-nominal situation.”

    2020-12-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #147 – Dmitri Dolgov: Waymo and the Future of Self-Driving Cars · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

36. “Yes. To be clear, we don't do teleportation. I'm going to believe in teleparation for a reason. That's not what we have in our cars. We do, as you mentioned, have a version of customer support. We call it Live Health. In fact, we find it that it's very important for our rider experience, especially if it's your first trip. You've never been in a fully driverless rider-only Waymore vehicle. You get in. There's nobody there. So you can imagine having all kinds of questions in your head, like how this thing works. So we've put a lot of thought into kind of guiding our writers, our customers through that experience, especially for the first time. They get some information on the phone if the fully driverless vehicle is used to service their trip. When you get into the car, we have in-car screen and audio that kind of guides them and explains what to expect. They also have a button that they can push that will connect.”

    2020-12-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #147 – Dmitri Dolgov: Waymo and the Future of Self-Driving Cars · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

37. “Of our drivers, of our fleet of drivers that is distributed across the fleet and it's updated in real time. So that's one use case. You can imagine as the density of these vehicles go up that they can exchange more information in terms of what they're planning to do and start influencing how they interact with each other, as well as potentially sharing some observations to help with if you have enough density of these vehicles where one car might be seeing something that another is relevant to another car that is very dynamic. It's not part of you're updating your static prior of the map of the world, but it's more of a dynamic information that could be relevant to the decisions that another car is making in real time. So you can see them exchanging that information and you can build on that. But again, I see that as an advantage, but it's not a requirement.”

    2020-12-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #147 – Dmitri Dolgov: Waymo and the Future of Self-Driving Cars · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

38. “Yeah, it's a spectrum. First and say that it helps and it helps in various ways, but it's not required right now with the way we build our system. Each cars can operate independently. They can operate with no connectivity. So I think it is important that you have a fully autonomous fully capable driver that computerized driver that each car has. Then they do share information and they share information in real time and it really helps. So the way we do this today is whenever one car encounters something interesting in the world, whether it might be an accident or a new construction zone, that information immediately gets uploaded over the air and is propagated to the rest of the fleet. in terms of the knowledge.”

    2020-12-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #147 – Dmitri Dolgov: Waymo and the Future of Self-Driving Cars · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

39. “There's an incredible. Amount of really interesting work that's happening there, both in the real-time operation of the fleet of cars and the information that they exchange with each other in real time to make better decisions, as well as kind of the off-board component where you have to deal with massive amounts of data for training your ML models, evaluating the ML models, for simulating the entire system, and for evaluating your entire system. And this is where being part of alphabet has once again been tremendously advantageous. We consume an incredible amount of compute for ML infrastructure. We build a lot of custom frameworks to get good at data mining, finding the interesting edge cases for training and for evaluation of the system for both training and evaluating some components.”

    2020-12-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #147 – Dmitri Dolgov: Waymo and the Future of Self-Driving Cars · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

40. “Going to be like that government, you know, you versus audio foes, but I, you know, I guess I will say that it's really compute is a really important. We have very data hungry and compute hungry ML models all over our stack. And this is where Being part of alphabet as well as designing our own sensors and the entire hardware suite together where on one hand you get access to like really rich raw sensor data that you can pipe from your sensors into your compute platform and build like build the whole pipe from sensor raw sensor data to the big compute and then have the massive compute to process all that data. This is where we're finding that having a lot of control of that hardware part of the stack is really advantageous”

    2020-12-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #147 – Dmitri Dolgov: Waymo and the Future of Self-Driving Cars · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

41. “It does have all of the characteristics, all the properties that you just mentioned, redundancy, very beefy compute for general processing as well as inference and ML models. It is some of the more sensitive stuff that I don't want to get into for IP reasons, but we've shared a little bit in terms of the specs of the sensors that we have on the car. We actually shared some videos of what are lighter sea in the world. We have 29 cameras. We have five lighters. We have six raiders on these vehicles. And you can kind of get a feel for the amount of data that they're producing. That all has to be processed in real time to do perception, to do complex reasoning. But I don't want to get into specifics of exactly how we build them.”

    2020-12-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #147 – Dmitri Dolgov: Waymo and the Future of Self-Driving Cars · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

42. “Different, you know, we work with partners, and there's some components that we get from our manufacturing and supply chain partners. What exactly is in-house is a bit different. We do a lot of custom design on all of our sensing materials, lighters, radars, cameras. Exactly, exclusively in-house and some of the technologies that we have, some of the fundamental technologies there are completely unique to Waymo. That is also largely true about radars and cameras. It's a little bit more of a mix in terms of what we do ourselves versus what we get from partners.”

    2020-12-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #147 – Dmitri Dolgov: Waymo and the Future of Self-Driving Cars · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

43. “That firefly vehicle also had the hardware suite that was mostly designed and engineered and built in-house. LIDARs are one of the more important components that we design and build from the ground up. So on the fifth generation of their drivers of our software and hardware that we're switching to right now, we have, as with previous generations, in terms of sensing, we have lightars, cameras, and radars. And we have a pretty beefy computer that processes all that information and makes decisions in real time on board the car. So in all of the, and it's really qualitative jump forward in terms of the capabilities and the various parameters and specs of the hardware compared to what we had before and compared to what you can kind of get off the shelf in the market. Market today.”

    2020-12-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #147 – Dmitri Dolgov: Waymo and the Future of Self-Driving Cars · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

44. “Sure. So we separate out the actual car that we are driving from the self-driving hardware we put on it. Right now we have, so this is, as I mentioned, the fifth generation. We've gone through, we started building our own hardware many, many years ago.”

    2020-12-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #147 – Dmitri Dolgov: Waymo and the Future of Self-Driving Cars · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

45. “Waymore as a company. We raised our first round of external financing this year. We were part of Alphabet, so obviously we have access to significant resources, but as kind of on the journey of way more maturing as a company, it made sense for us to partially go externally in this round. So we raised about $3.2 billion from that round. We've also started putting our fifth generation of our driver, our hardware that is on the new vehicle, but it's also a qualitatively different set of self-driving hardware that self that is now on the JLR pace. So that was a very important step for us.”

    2020-12-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #147 – Dmitri Dolgov: Waymo and the Future of Self-Driving Cars · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

46. “Yeah, it is magical. It is transformative. This is what we hear from our writers. It kind of really changes your experience. And that really is what unlocks the real potential of this technology. But coming back to our journey, that was 2017 when we started truly driverless operations. Then in 2018, we've launched our public commercial service that we called Wayma1 in Phoenix. In 2019, we started offering truly driverless writer-only rides to our early writer population of users. And then 2020 has also been a pretty interesting year, one of the first ones less about technology, but more about the maturing and the growth of”

    2020-12-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #147 – Dmitri Dolgov: Waymo and the Future of Self-Driving Cars · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

47. “That's absolutely magical. I've taken many of these rides and completely empty car. No human in the car pulls up. You call it on your cell phone. It pulls up. You get in. It takes you on its way. There's nobody in the car. You, right? That's something we call fully driverless or rider only mode of operation.”

    2020-12-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #147 – Dmitri Dolgov: Waymo and the Future of Self-Driving Cars · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

48. “That's exactly right. So on that first day, we actually hit a mix. And we didn't want to be on YouTube and Twitter that same day. So in many of the rides, we had somebody in the driver's seat. They could not disengage like the car not disengage. But actually, on that first day”

    2020-12-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #147 – Dmitri Dolgov: Waymo and the Future of Self-Driving Cars · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

49. “2016, end of 2016, beginning of 2017 was when we founded Waymo, the company. That's when that was the next phase of the project where we believed in kind of the commercial vision of this technology. And it made sense to create an independent empty within that alphabet umbrella to pursue this product at scale. Beyond that, in 2017, later in 2017 was another really huge step for us, really big milestone where we started, it was October of 2017, where we started regular driverless operations on public roads, that first day of operations we drove in one day, in that first day 100 miles in driverless fashion. And then we've the most important thing about that milestone was not. 100 miles in one day, but that it was the start of kind of regular ongoing driverless operations.”

    2020-12-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #147 – Dmitri Dolgov: Waymo and the Future of Self-Driving Cars · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

50. “And, you know, we only, but at that time, it took a tremendous amount of engineering. It took a tremendous amount of validation to get to that point. But we only did it a few times. We only did that. It was a fixed route. It was not kind of a controlled environment, but it was a fixed route, and we only did a few times.”

    2020-12-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #147 – Dmitri Dolgov: Waymo and the Future of Self-Driving Cars · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source