From Models to Mobility: Building Waymo with Dmitri Dolgov
Episode publishedPodcast: The a16z ShowThe a16z Show
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When you're driving around or being driven around, say, you know, we think about what we're building as a driver. I can imagine building a big model that understands how the physical world works and understands the important properties of what it means to drive, the social aspects of driving, and what it means to be a good driver as opposed to a bad one. I would say that we've clearly moved past the stage of scientific research and kind of deep core technology development to this new phase of accelerated global scaling and deployment.
Waymo is now doing nearly half a million fully autonomous rides a week across multiple cities, a shift from long term research to real world scale. In this episode, originally aired on the Cheeky Pint podcast, Waymo co CEO Dmitry Dolgov joins John Collison to break down how they built the system behind it. From the sensor stack and why LiDAR still matters, to the role of simulation and critic models in training the AI. They also get into why driver assist won't naturally evolve into full autonomy, what it takes to scale globally, and how the product itself is changing from custom built vehicle
Dmitry Dalgarv is co CEO of Waymo. He joined Google's self driving car project in 2009 as one of its first engineers and was repeatedly promoted until he took it over in 2021. Waymo is Google's most successful moonshot and now provides over 500,000 fully autonomous rides each week. Cheers, by the way. Yeah. Cheers. You grew up in Russia.
Right? I grew up in Russia. Yep. Then I I was actually Soviet Union.
Right. Right. Exactly.
It's My dad is a physicist.
Yeah.
So the Soviet Union started falling apart, and then, you know, he, got had a position a visiting position in university, in Kyoto University Mhmm. For a year. We moved there as a family, and then he went to Berkeley, and then kinda tagged along. And then I ran out of, you know I graduated from high school. Yep. I was thinking about the next thing I wanted to do, and I really liked that, that that, technical school in Russia. The Russians
are serious about the physics.
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