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The Waymo World Model

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Re: The Waymo World Model

#251

Post by smallmancontrov »

ChicagoDave wrote: post #242
smallmancontrov wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The inputs to FSD are: 7 cameras x 36fps x 5Mpx x 30s 48kHz audio Nav maps and route for next few miles 100Hz kinematics (speed, IMU, odometry, etc) Source: https://youtu.be/LFh9GAzHg1c?t=571

Fog, heavy rain, heavy snow, people running between cars or from an obstructed view… None of these technologies can ever be 100%, so we’re basically accepting a level of needless death. Musk has even shrugged off FSD related deaths as, “progress”.

Humans: 70 deaths in 7 billion miles

FSD: 2 deaths in 7 billion miles

Looks like FSD saves lives by a margin so fat it can probably survive most statistical games.

Re: The Waymo World Model

#252

Post by promiseofbeans »

ra7 wrote: post #155
codexb wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

3d from moving 2d images has been a thing for decades.

This is 3D LiDAR output (multimodal) from 2D images.

LiDAR is the technology used to do spatial capture. The output is just point clouds of surfaces. So they’re generating surface point clouds from video

Re: The Waymo World Model

#253

Post by gambiting »

jellojello wrote: post #118
mooktakim wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tesla built something like this for FSD training, they presented many years ago. I never understood why they did productize it. It would have made a brilliant Maps alternative, which country automatically update from Tesla cars on the road. Could live update with speed cameras and road conditions. Like many things they've fallen behind

Without Lidar + the terrible quality of tesla onboard cameras.. street view would look terrible. The biggest L of elon's career is the weird commitment to no-lidar. If you've ever driven a Tesla, it gives daily messages "the left side camera is blocked" etc.. cameras+weather don't mix either.

>>The biggest L of elon's career is the weird commitment to no-lidar.

I thought it was the Nazi salutes on stage and backing neo-nazi groups everywhere around the world, but you know, I guess the lidar thing too.

Re: The Waymo World Model

#254

Post by arctic-true »

breckinloggins wrote: post #55
PeterStuer wrote: post #38

Imagine driving in a Waymo 'out of a raging fire'. Talk about edge cases. But, what would you do? Trust the Waymo, or get out (or never get in) at the first sign of trouble?

Interesting question. If the Waymo was driving aggressively to remove us from the situation but relatively safely I might stay in it. This does bring up something, though: Waymo has a "pull over" feature, but it's hidden behind a couple of touch screen actions involving small virtual buttons and it does not pull over immediately. Instead, it "finds a spot to pull over". I would very much like a big red STOP IMMEDIATE…

I feel like this ends with drunk morons accidentally creating Waymo barricades and totally ruining Mardi Gras

Re: The Waymo World Model

#255

Post by 420official »

nightpool wrote: post #221

Interesting, but it feels like it's going to cope very poorly with actually safety-critical situations. Having a world model that's trained on successful driving data feels like it's going to "launder" a lot of implicit assumptions that would cause a car to get into a crash in real life (e.g. there's probably no examples in the training data where the car is behind a stopped car, and the driver pulls over to another…

You're forgetting that they are also training with real data from the 100+ million miles they've driven on real roads with riders, and using that data to train the world model AI.

> there's probably no examples in the training data where the car is behind a stopped car, and the driver pulls over to another lane and another car comes from behind and crashes into the driver because it didn't check its blindspot

This specific scenario is in the examples: https://videos.ctfassets.net/7ijaobx36mtm/3wK6IWWc8UmhFNUSyy...

It doesn't show the failure mode, it demonstrates the successful crash avoidance.

Re: The Waymo World Model

#256

Post by jeffbee »

jrm4 wrote: post #163

1. Still hard not to think that this is a huge waste of time as opposed to something that's a little more like a public transport train-ish thing, i.e. integrate with established infrastructure. 2. No seriously, is the filipino driver thing confirmed? It really feels like they're trying to bury that.

They are not trying to "bury" remote assistance at all. They wrote a white paper about it in 2020 and a blog post about it in 2024.

Anyway you can think it's a waste but they're wasting their money, not yours. If you want a train in your town, go get one. Waymo has only spent, cumulatively, about 4 months of the budgets of American transit agencies. If you had all that money it wouldn't amount to anything.

Re: The Waymo World Model

#257

Post by AlfredBarnes »

phkahler wrote: post #206
mattlondon wrote: post #89

Suddenly all this focus on world models by Deep mind starts to make sense. I've never really thought of Waymo as a robot in the same way as e.g. a Boston Dynamics humanoid, but of course it is a robot of sorts. Google/Alphabet are so vertically integrated for AI when you think about it. Compare what they're doing - their own power generation , their own silicon, their own data centers, search Gmail YouTube Gemini wor…

Google has been doing more R&D and internal deployment of AI and less trying to sell it as a product. IMHO that difference in focus makes a huge difference. I used to think their early work on self-driving cars was primarily to support Street View in thier maps.

It has always felt to me that the LLM chatbots were a surprise to Google, not LLMs, or machine learning in general.

Re: The Waymo World Model

#258

Post by kanbara »

smallmancontrov wrote: post #228
ambicapter wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So if they’re already “fusioning” all these things, why would LIDAR be any different?

Tesla went nothing-but-nets (making fusion easy) and Chinese LIDAR became cheap around 2023, but monocular depth estimation was spectacularly good by 2021. By the time unit cost and integration effort came down, LIDAR had very little to offer a vision stack that no longer struggled to perceive the 3D world around it. Also, integration effort went down but it never disappeared. Meanwhile, opportunity cost skyrocketed…

depth estimation is but one part of the problem— atmospheric and other conditions which blind optical visible spectrum sensors, lack of ambient (sunlight) and more. lidar simply outperforms (performs at all?) in these conditions. and provides hardware back distance maps, not software calculated estimation

Re: The Waymo World Model

#260

Post by thefounder »

coffeemug wrote: post #196
thefounder wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But somehow google fails to execute. Gemini is useless for programming and I don’t think even bother to use it as chat app. Claude code + gpt 5.2 xhigh for coding and gpt as chat app are really the only ones that are worth it(price and time wise)

I've recently switched to Claude for chat. GPT 5.2 feels very engagement-maxxed for me, like I'm reading a bad LinkedIn post. Claude does a tiny bit of this too, but an order of magnitude less in my experience. I never thought I'd switch from ChatGPT, but there is only so much "here's the brutal truth, it's not x it's y" I can take.

To me ChatGPT seems smarter and knows more. That’s why I use it. Even Claude rates gpt better for knowledge answers. Not sure if that itself is any indication. Claude seems superficial unless you hammer it to generate a good answer.
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