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The Waymo World Model

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Re: The Waymo World Model

#521

Post by socialcommenter »

smallmancontrov wrote: post #251
ChicagoDave wrote: post #242

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.

How many of the 70 human accidents would be adequately explained by controlling for speed, alcohol, wanton inattention, etc? (The first two alone reduce it by 70%)

No customer would turn on FSD on an icy road, or on country lanes in the UK which are one lane but run in both directions; it's much harder to have a passenger fatality in stop-start traffic jams in downtown US cities.

Even if those numbers are genuine (2 vs 70) I wouldn't consider it apples-for-apples.

Public information campaigns and proper policing have a role to play in car safety, if that's the stated goal we don't necessarily need to sink billions into researching self driving

Re: The Waymo World Model

#522

Post by belter »

rvnx wrote: post #483
belter wrote: post #464

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because after the death of Epstein he suddenly had a lot of free time? https://www.wsj.com/finance/jeffrey-epstein-advised-sergey-b... https://x.com/MarioNawfal/status/2017428928814588323

If this is true, this is disappointing :/ On a similar topic, it is worth mentioning the entrepreneurs that are forced into sex (or let’s say, very pushed) by VCs. For those who feel safe or taking it as a joke, this affects women AND men. Some people are going to be disappointed about their heroes.

>> If this is true, this is disappointing

Wait for the second set of files...

"...One of Mr. Epstein’s former boat captains told The New York Times earlier this year that he had seen Mr. Brin on the island more than once..."

https://dnyuz.com/2026/01/31/powerful-men-who-turn-up-in-the...

Re: The Waymo World Model

#523

Post by dyauspitr »

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?

I don’t think coming up with novel situations is all that hard. LLMs already do it in text form all the time.

Re: The Waymo World Model

#524

Post by anupamchugh »

ra7 wrote: post #22

The novel aspect here seems to be 3D LiDAR output from 2D video using post-training. As far as I'm aware, no other video world models can do this. IMO, access to DeepMind and Google infra is a hugely understated advantage Waymo has that no other competitor can replicate.

This is the real story buried under the simulation angle. If you can generate reliable 3D LiDAR from 2D video, every dashcam on earth becomes training data. Every YouTube driving video, every GoPro clip, every security camera feed.

Waymo's fleet is ~700 cars. The internet has millions of hours of driving footage. This technique turns the entire internet into a sensor suite. That's a bigger deal than the simulation itself.

Re: The Waymo World Model

#525

Post by servo_sausage »

digbybk wrote: post #473
servo_sausage wrote: post #338

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

The cost of avoiding public transport in NYC is massive compared to most cities...

Living there, without the means to avoid public transport is something I would also consider insane.

Re: The Waymo World Model

#526

Post by nelsondev »

Neat! What happens when the simulated data is hallucinated/incorrect?

In the example videos, the Golden Gate bridge with snow shows the bridge as 1 road, with total of 3 lanes. But in reality, it’s a split highway with divider, so 2 sides both have 3 lanes, 6 total lanes.

What happens when the car “learns” to drive on the simulated incorrect 3 lane example? For example will next time it goes on the real GG bridge hug to the rightmost lane?

Re: The Waymo World Model

#527

Post by codeka »

rcpt wrote: post #508
ASalazarMX wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At first I gave him the benefit of the doubt, like that weird decision of Steve Jobs banning Adobe Flash, which ran most of the fun parts of the Internet back then, that ended up spreading HTML5. Now I just think he refused LIDAR on purely aesthetic reasons. The cost is not even that significant compared to the overall cost of a Tesla.

> purely aesthetic reasons This is huge though. People aren't setting them on fire during protests, and if an FSD Tesla plows into a farmers market, it might not even make the news. People hate tech so much that self-driving companies with easy-to-spot cars have had to shut down after just a few mistakes. Disguising Teslas as plain old regular human-driven cars is a great idea and I wouldn't be surprised if they win…

People aren't setting Teslas on fire? Where do you get that from?

https://www.forbes.com/sites/conormurray/2025/05/01/tesla-pr...

Re: The Waymo World Model

#528

Post by scoofy »

takethebus wrote: post #512
scoofy wrote: post #479

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 p…

Taxes? The same place tons of other stuff we buy as a society comes from. I expect the ballot measure this fall will pass, worst case they file bankruptcy and will probably need to reduce service

I mean, sure? I'd prefer to have a system that has a system built in that raises and lowers the level of service in accordance with the number of people using the system rather than having to have random elections that decide whether or not we're going to effectively scrape a large parts of the system.

Re: The Waymo World Model

#529

Post by robotresearcher »

acomjean wrote: post #516
cyanydeez wrote: post #380

Earlier quoted context omitted.

ok, but the point trying to be made is based on human's depth perception, but a car's basic limitation is the width of the vehicle, so there's missing information if you're trying to figure out if a car can use cameras to do what human eyes/brains do.

Humans are very good at processing the images that come into our brain. Each eye has a “blind spot” but we don’t notice. Our eyes adjust color (fluorescent lights are weird) and the amount of light coming in. When we look through a screen door or rain and just ignore it, or if you look outside a moving vehicle to the side you can ignore the foreground. If you increase the distance of stereo cameras you probably can i…

Radar has a cool property that it can sense the relative velocity of objects along the beam axis too, from Doppler frequency shifting. It’s one sense that cars have that humans don’t.

Re: The Waymo World Model

#530

Post by wisty »

vinkelhake wrote: post #345
hungryhobbit wrote: post #325

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It's far from the only example https://killedbygoogle.com/
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