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The Waymo World Model

waymo.com

341–350 of 699 posts

Re: The Waymo World Model

#341

By leveraging Genie’s immense world knowledge, it can simulate exceedingly rare events—from a tornado to a casual encounter with an elephant—that are almost impossible to capture at scale in reality. The model’s architecture offers high controllability, allowing our engineers to modify simulations with simple language prompts, driving inputs, and scene layouts. Notably, the Waymo World Model generates high-fidelity,…

They probably just look at the results of the generation.

I mean would I like a in-depth tour of this? Yes.

But it's a marketing blog article, what do you expect?

Re: The Waymo World Model

#342

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is so wild to read when Waymo is currently doing like 500,000 paid rides every week , all over the country, with no one in the driver's seat. Meanwhile Tesla seems to have a handful of robotaxis in Austin, and it's unclear if any of them are actually driverless. But the Tesla engineers are "in the right place rather than hitting bottlenecks from over depending on Lidar data"? What?

Tesla has driven 7.5B autonomous miles to Waymo's 0.2B, but yes, Waymo looks like they are ahead when you stratify the statistics according to the ass-in-driver-seat variable and neglect the stratum that makes Tesla look good. The real question is whether doing so is smart or dumb. Is Tesla hiding big show-stopper problems that will prevent them from scaling without a safety driver? Or are the big safety problems sol…

semi autonomous

Re: The Waymo World Model

#343

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Isn't there a great deal of gaming going on with the car disengaging FSD milliseconds before crashing? Voila, no "full" "self" driving accident; just another human failing [*]!

[*] Failing to solve the impossible situation FSD dropped them into, that is.

Re: The Waymo World Model

#344
post #95

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…

I always understood this to be why Tesla started working on humanoid robots

I don't want a humanoid robot. I want a purpose built robot.

Re: The Waymo World Model

#345
post #302

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I also think the presence of Sergey Brin has been making a difference in this.

Please, Google was terrible about using the tech the had long before Sundar, back when Brin was in charge. Google Reader is a simple example: Googl had by far the most popular RSS reader, and they just threw it away. A single intern could have kept the whole thing running, and Google has literal billions, but they couldn't see the value in it. I mean, it's not like being able to see what a good portion of America is…

Is there an equivalent to Godwin's law wrt threads about Google and Google Reader?

See also: any programming thread and Rust.

Re: The Waymo World Model

#346
post #310

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Neither do cars?

Drivers, however, absolutely do. And I do not see enough drivers voting away their own ability to drive any time soon.

A few years ago I would have (and did) considered the notion that manually programming was about to turn into a quaint relic and computers would be writing 90%+ of code preposterous. Once an alternative becomes obviously superior things can change very fast.

Re: The Waymo World Model

#347
post #318
post #313

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well then invest in those things, then. It would probably cost less than the amount they're spending to make a Waymo World Model.

Lighting money on fire by funding an extremely expensive system that most people don't want to use is not an "investment." It's just a good way to make everyone much poorer and worse off than if we'd done nothing. The only way to change things is to convince the electorate that we actually do need rules and enforcement and a sustainable transportation system . This isn't just happening in America. Train systems are i…

People want to use it everywhere in the world

Re: The Waymo World Model

#348
post #302

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I also think the presence of Sergey Brin has been making a difference in this.

Please, Google was terrible about using the tech the had long before Sundar, back when Brin was in charge. Google Reader is a simple example: Googl had by far the most popular RSS reader, and they just threw it away. A single intern could have kept the whole thing running, and Google has literal billions, but they couldn't see the value in it. I mean, it's not like being able to see what a good portion of America is…

Took a while but I got to the google reader post. Self host tt-rss, it's much better

Re: The Waymo World Model

#349

By leveraging Genie’s immense world knowledge, it can simulate exceedingly rare events—from a tornado to a casual encounter with an elephant—that are almost impossible to capture at scale in reality. The model’s architecture offers high controllability, allowing our engineers to modify simulations with simple language prompts, driving inputs, and scene layouts. Notably, the Waymo World Model generates high-fidelity,…

> from a tornado to a casual encounter with an elephant

A sims style game with this technology will be pretty nice!

Re: The Waymo World Model

#350
post #74

Interesting that this should come out right as lawmakers are beginning to understand that Waymos have overseas operators making major decisions. [*] https://futurism.com/advanced-transport/waymos-controlled-wo...

Why is this relevant at all? Having humans in the loop at some level is necessary for handling rare edge cases safely.

The word "loop" here has multiple meanings. Only one is what you mean and the other person responding to you has understood another.

The first is the DDT control loop, what a human driver does. Waymo's remote assistants aren't involved in that. The computer always has responsibility for the safety of the vehicle and decisionmaking while operating, which is why Waymo's humans are remote assistants and not remote drivers. Their safety drivers do participate in the DDT loop, hence the name.

But there's also another "loop" of human involvement. Sometimes the vehicle doesn't understand the scene and asks humans for advice about the appropriate action to take. It's vaguely similar to captchas. The human will usually confirm the computer's proposed actions, but they can also suggest different actions. The computer the advice as a prior to continue operating instead of giving up the DDT responsibility. There's very likely a closely monitored SLA between a few seconds to a few minutes on how long it takes humans to start looking at the scene.

If something causes the computer to believe the advice isn't safe, it will ignore it. There have been cases where Waymos have erroneously detected collisions and remote assistants were unable to override that decisionmaking. When that happens, a vehicle recovery team is physically sent out to the location. The SLA here is likely between tens of minutes and a couple hours.

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