Live data from Hacker News

The Waymo World Model

waymo.com

471–480 of 699 posts

Re: The Waymo World Model

#471

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,…

seems like the obvious answer to that is you cover a patch of road with 5mm ball bearings, and send a waymo to drive across it. if the ball bearings behave the way the simulation says they would, and the car behaves the way the simulation said it would, then you've validated your simulation.

do that for enough different scenarios, and if the model is consistently accurate across every scenario you validate, then you can start believing that it will also be accurate for the scenarios you haven't (and can't) validate.

Re: The Waymo World Model

#473
post #265

All this work is impressive, but I'd rather have better trains

Trains need well behaved people, otherwise they are shit. I don't want to hear tiktok or full volume soap operas blasting at some deaf mouth breather. I don't want to be near loud chewing of smelly leftovers. I don't want to be begged for money, or interact with high or psychotic people. The current culture doesn't allow enforcement of social behaviour: so public transport will always be a miserable containment vesse…

> everyone with sense avoids the whole thing

Or the majority of the residents of New York City on their daily commute? I like to think I have sense, and I happily use public transport most days. I prefer it to sitting in traffic, isolated in a car. At least I can read a book. If you work too hard to insulate yourself from the world, the spaces you'll feel comfortable in will get more and more narrow. I think that's a bad thing.

Re: The Waymo World Model

#474

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ex-googler: I doubt it, but am curious for rationale (i know there was a round of PR re: him “coming back to help with AI.” but just between you and me, the word on him internally, over years and multiple projects, was having him around caused chaos b/c he was a tourist flitting between teams, just spitting out ideas, but now you have unclear direction and multiple teams hearing the same “you should” and doing it)

That makes sense. A "secret shopper" might be a better way to avoid that but wouldn't give him the strokes of being the god in the room.

He was shopping for other strokes from Google employees: https://finance.yahoo.com/blogs/the-exchange/alleged-affair-...

Re: The Waymo World Model

#475
post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah. Waymo described how this works a couple of years ago: https://waymo.com/blog/2024/05/fleet-response/

Right, I totally believe Waymo, just like I totally believed Amazon's checkout-less stores.

What's your theory for how it works?

Re: The Waymo World Model

#476
post #45

Seems interesting, but why is it broken. Waymo repeatedly directed multiple automated vehicles into the private alley off of 5th near Brannan in SF even after being told none of them have any business there ever, period. If they can sense the weather and stuff then maybe they could put out a virtual sign or fence that notes what appears to be a road is neither a through way nor open to the public? I'm really bullish…

>> get them to comply with the same laws that limit what people can do I think you meant, "Attempt" to limit what people can do. Driving in SF (for example) provides many opportunities to see "free will" exerted in the most extreme ways -- laws be damned.

Have you ever seen a cop trying to pull over a Waymo? It isn't going well.

Re: The Waymo World Model

#477

It’s impressive to see simulation training for floods, tornadoes, and wildfires. But it’s also kind of baffling that a city full of Waymos all seemed to fail simultaneously in San Francisco when the power went out on Dec 22. A power outage feels like a baseline scenario—orders of magnitude more common than the disasters in this demo. If the system can’t degrade gracefully when traffic lights go dark, what exactly is…

[deleted]

Re: The Waymo World Model

#478
post #408

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What do you think I said that you're contradicting? IMO the presence of safety chase vehicles is just a sensible "as low as reasonably achievable" measure during the early rollout. I'm not sure that can (fairly) be used as a point against them. I'm comfortably with Tesla sparing no expense for safety, since I think we all (including Tesla) understand that this isn't the ultimate implementation. In fact, I think it wo…

> IMO the presence of safety chase vehicles is just a sensible "as low as reasonably achievable" measure during the early rollout. I'm not sure that can (fairly) be used as a point against them. Only if you're comparing them to another company, which you seem to be. So yes, yes it can. Seriously, the amount of sheer cope here is insane. Waymo is doing the thing. Tesla is not. If Tesla were capable of doing it, they w…

[deleted]

Re: The Waymo World Model

#479
post #450

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can't say that BART "is facing bankruptcy is precisely because it was mostly rider supported and profitable, and not government supported" when it is very obvious that BART would be in a much worse situation if it had had more government support... because all those governments are facing massive budget deficits right now. BART has already been bailed out by the state, twice . It has already failed, twice. It ver…

The government facing a budget deficit doesn't mean BART would be worse off with more subsidies.

Where does the extra money come from in a deficit period?

> BART, Muni, Caltrain, AC Transit — which an independent analysis confirmed face annual deficits of more than $800 million annually starting in fiscal year 2027-28

https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/california/2026/01/06/ba...

Nearly a billion dollar shortfall per year going forward. That’s nontrivial, and the state has lost patience with the systems after providing two bailouts already.

Re: The Waymo World Model

#480

What's going to happen to all the millions of drivers who will lose their job overnight? In a country with 100 million guns, are we really sure we've thought this through?

this sounds like a major benefit.

i dont want my uber driver bragging anout how theyre going to shoot me before i get out of the car

Post reply on HN