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The Waymo World Model

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Re: The Waymo World Model

#411

Post by kevincox »

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.

I am very pro public transit. But there is still a place for cars (ideally mostly taxis). Going to more rural areas or when you need to carry more stuff. I think an ideal society would have both urban transit, inter-city transit and taxis for the other trips and going out into the country.

Re: The Waymo World Model

#412

Post by Mawr »

xnx wrote: post #315
anigbrowl wrote: post #287

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think individual vehicles can ever achieve the same envirnmental economies of scale as trains. Certainly they're far more convenient (especially for short-haul journeys) but I also think they're somewhat alienating, in that they're engineering humans out of the loop completely which contributes to social atomization.

> I don't think individual vehicles can ever achieve the same envirnmental economies of scale as trains. I think you'd be surprised. Look at the difference in cost per passenger mile.

I'm looking. Comes out unfavorably to cars. Obviously.

I guess you're comparing the total cost of trains vs a subset of costs of cars, as is usual. Road use and pollution are free externalities after all.

Re: The Waymo World Model

#413

Post by ex-aws-dude »

sixo wrote: post #409
ex-aws-dude wrote: post #407

I don't get how this solves the problem of edge cases with self driving Even if you can generate simulated training data, don't you still have the problem where you don't even know what the edge cases you need to simulate are in the first place?

Well it certainly helps,doesn't it? This system is going to encounter more edge cases than a single human ever would. Hopefully the lessons from known unknowns generqlise to unknowns. And once they've been seen once they took can become part of the corpus.

Right but does this just rely on some human "brainstorming" a bunch of edge cases?

It just strikes me as neverending edge case wack-a-mole

A human doesn't need to see tons of examples of tornados and elephants to know to stop the car

Doesn't that indicate some fundamental difference between the model and a human driver?

Re: The Waymo World Model

#415

Post by largbae »

hungryhobbit wrote: post #325
hosh wrote: 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…

Can you not vibe code it back into existence yet?

Re: The Waymo World Model

#416

Post by rootusrootus »

xnx wrote: post #286
rootusrootus wrote: post #216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Human drivers will be banned, the roads will be exclusively used by autonomous vehicles I basically agree with your premise that public transit as it exists today will be rendered obsolete, but I think this point here is where your prediction hits a wall. I would be stunned if we agreed to eliminate human drivers from the road in my lifetime, or the lifetime of anyone alive today. Waymo is amazing, but still just a…

> I would be stunned if we agreed to eliminate human drivers from the road in my lifetime It basically happened for horses.

Did it? I did a cursory search and it seems like many places still permit horse-drawn carriages, just not on limited access highways. Sometimes with fairly onerous licensing and operational requirements (speed limits, poo management, etc), but still allowed.

Re: The Waymo World Model

#417

Post by tamimio »

add-sub-mul-div wrote: post #5

"Autonomous" https://cybernews.com/news/waymo-overseas-human-agents-robot...

Yeah I have some videos of these drivers in action, I think the sensors are as assistance and but not the whole story, so yeah there’s models lidars etc etc but human factor is there, unfortunately this means we should see soon many cobitics are teleopetated remotely from India and Philippines and the likes to satisfy the greed of these companies to pay peanuts to operate them.

Re: The Waymo World Model

#418

Post by rootusrootus »

Jblx2 wrote: post #249
rootusrootus wrote: post #216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Human drivers will be banned, the roads will be exclusively used by autonomous vehicles I basically agree with your premise that public transit as it exists today will be rendered obsolete, but I think this point here is where your prediction hits a wall. I would be stunned if we agreed to eliminate human drivers from the road in my lifetime, or the lifetime of anyone alive today. Waymo is amazing, but still just a…

Is that: - I would be stunned if we agree to eliminate human drivers from 100% of roads in the lifetime of anyone alive today. or - I would be stunned if we agree to eliminate human drivers from 10% of roads... ...or is there some other percentage to qualify this? I guess I wouldn't expect there to be a decree that makes it happen all at once for a country. Especially a large country like the U.S.. More like, some re…

That is a fair point, since it is fairly safe to make "this absolute claim will never happen." And the person I replied to did say 'exclusively', which implies 100% elimination of human drivers. But still, I appreciate your nuance.

And in the spirit of that nuance, I will revise my statement slightly. I think it is entirely possible we will eliminate drivers on 10% of roads. We have rules that are analogous to that already with limited access highways. Though I would rate this still as unlikely, since such roads only make up just over 1% of all the roads in the US as it is. Not sure what the % is for other countries, probably less.

> some really dense city will decide to make a tiny core autonomous vehicles only

Agree 100%, this kind of thing I do expect to see happen. We already have exclusions for cars altogether in favor of pedestrians, so the precedent is set.

Re: The Waymo World Model

#419

Post by rootusrootus »

ianburrell wrote: post #275
spaceywilly wrote: post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My view on Waymo and autonomous taxis in general is they will eventually make public transit obsolete. Once there is a robotaxi available to pick up and drop off every passenger directly from a to b, the whole system could be made to be super efficient. It will take time to get there though. But eventually I think we will get there. Human drivers will be banned, the roads will be exclusively used by autonomous vehicl…

Automated taxis would still be stuck in traffic. Automation gets couple times in capacity, but the induced demand and extra cars looking for rides and parking will mean traffic. Automation makes public transit better. There will be automated minibuses that are more flexible and frequent than today's buses. Automation also means that buses get a virtual bus lane. Taxis solve the last mile problem, by taking taxi to th…

> There will be automated minibuses that are more flexible and frequent than today's buses.

In my sleepy metro area that has at least mid-tier respectable public transit (by US standards only), otherwise known as Portland, I think a lot of the routes would be better served by minibuses than full size. I wonder how the economics work out on that. Maybe dominated by labor? Tri-met drivers have a reputation of being paid handsomely as they gain seniority.

Re: The Waymo World Model

#420

Post by jayd16 »

yummypaint wrote: post #337

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,…

I don't think you say "ok now the car is ball bearing proof."

Think of it more like unit tests. "In this synthetic scenario does the car stop as expected, does it continue as expected." You might hit some false negatives but there isn't a downside to that.

If it turns out your model has a blind spot for albino cows in a snow storm eating marshmallows, you might be able to catch that synthetically and spend some extra effort to prevent it.

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