Waymo’s Journey to Full Autonomy: AI Breakthroughs, Safety, and Scaling

**Elad Gil** (0:05)
Hi, listeners, welcome to No Priors. Today, we're hanging out with Dmitri Dolgov, co-CEO of Waymo. Waymo started as the Chauffeur Project within Google back in 2009 and eventually spun off as its own company. Now, it provides over 100,000 paid rides each week across San Francisco, LA, Austin and Phoenix. I love taking Waymo's and I'm regularly campaigning for better South Bay coverage. We're excited to dig into all things robo-taxis, self-driving, what it takes to deploy this technology on a mass scale and what's next for Waymo.

**Sarah** (0:36)
Well, Dmitri, thank you so much for joining us today. Thank you for having me. Maybe we can start off with just a little bit of a history of self-driving at Google, how you got involved and how things have evolved over time.

**Dmitri Dolgov** (0:45)
I've been doing this for quite a few years, I think about 18 No, I got started in around 2006 This was the time of the Darpa Grand Challenges. This is when Darpa organized a few competitions, they called the Grand Challenge in Robotics for the purpose of advancing research in autonomous vehicles. And so the first competition they had was the first Grand Challenge, the first challenge there was to create a car that could drive autonomously in a desert. I just completed the stack in Wyomard, but you know, drive for about a hundred miles. Nobody succeeded, but you know, there's a lot of great progress that was made. And then they repeated the challenge and a few teams succeeded. So on the heels of that, they created another challenge, that's called the Darpa Urban Challenge, where the setup was kind of a mock city that was supposed to imitate what driving on public roads is like. And that's the one that I was involved in. I was on Stanford's team. This was kind of my, you know, moment where it clicked for me. I saw the future and the benefits and I've never looked back. That's what I've been doing ever since. And then we started this project at Google in 2009
It was a small group of us and then that grew into what now is Waymo when we started the company in the very beginning of 2017

**Sarah** (2:10)
It seems like a lot of the lineage or history of this field all traces back to a handful of labs. You know, it's like Sebastian Threm's lab at Stanford and a few others. And it seems like the founders of a lot of the companies that ended up eventually existing in this ecosystem all came out of the same sort of cohort of people, which I always think is fascinating to think about in terms of lineages.

**Dmitri Dolgov** (2:28)
Yeah, no, definitely a small world. The CMU team and the Stanford team are a few people who came and started this project at Google in 2009, came from those teams.

**Sarah** (2:38)
I think when you started working on this, this was considered a little bit of a crazy thing to do, right? It was early on. A lot of parts of the waves of deep learning hadn't really quite happened yet in terms of applications across all sorts of areas, like AlexNet hadn't existed yet, like all these other sorts of things that...

**Dmitri Dolgov** (2:53)
Well, nothing existed, right? Yeah, you're absolutely right. People heard a lot about us being crazy and never going to work, in full honesty with ourselves. We're not exactly sure if we're just a little bit crazy or not completely insane when we're trying to go after this problem.

**Elad Gil** (3:11)
Did you treat it as an open-ended research project, or you treat it as like, hey, you had an idea in your mind of an endpoint date where this would be viable on public roads?

**Dmitri Dolgov** (3:20)
More of the former, but it was not research. In the University of the Darpa Challenge Day, it was a research project. Then when we started Google, it was under the belief that we can make it work. And if we can, then the impact, the positive impact of this technology on the world and the mission is worth it. But it was early days, so we actually had very little data to go by in terms of thinking about how long it's going to take and how hard the problem is.

**Sarah** (3:56)
How long did you think it was going to take? Like at the time that you started learning about this?

**Dmitri Dolgov** (4:00)
I don't know if we had any specific data, but that was actually the first question that we posed. It's not build a product, right? In the first couple of years or so, we didn't have like a product in mind or a target data mind. The first order of business was to explore the space.