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

🍻 Don't miss the next round of Cheeky Pint! Subscribe to our new channel for all future episodes and clips: https://www.youtube.com/@CheekyPint 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. Full transcript on Substack: https://open.substack.com/pub/cheekypint/p/the-20-year-journey-to-fully-autonomous Subscribe to Cheeky Pint Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/2IHbGJJ... Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast... Substack: https://substack.com/@cheekypint/note/p-191214714?r=5su49q&utm_source=notes-share-action&utm_medium=web Key moments 00:00:00 Introduction 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/