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The Waymo World Model

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Re: The Waymo World Model

#571

Post by xnxnxkx »

GoatOfAplomb wrote: post #215
joshuamerrill wrote: post #200

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…

All this simulation buys a single vehicle that drives better. That failure was a fleet-wide event (overloading the remote assistance humans). That is, both are true: this high-fidelity simulation is valuable and it won't catch all failure modes. Or in other words, it's still on Waymo for failing during the power outage, but it's not uniquely on Waymo's simulation team.

[flagged]

Re: The Waymo World Model

#572

Post by ChicagoDave »

smallmancontrov wrote: post #363
ChicagoDave wrote: post #316

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is absolutely a Musk defender. FSD and Tesla related deaths are much higher. https://www.tesladeaths.com/index-amp.html

Autopilot is the shitty lane assist. FSD is the SOTA neural net. Your link agrees with me: > 2 fatalities involving the use of FSD

Tesla sales are dead across the world. Cybertruck is a failure. Chinese EVs are demonstrably better.

No one wants these crappy cars anymore.

Re: The Waymo World Model

#573

Post by [deleted] »

nunez wrote: post #564
scoofy wrote: post #312

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As someone who lives in the Bay Area we already have trains, and they're literally past the point of bankruptcy because they (1) don't actually charge enough maintain the variable cost of operations, (2) don't actually make people pay at all, and (3) don't actually enforce any quality of life concerns short of breaking up literal fights. All of this creates negative synergies that pushes a huge, mostly silent segment…

As a fellow public transit fan, you're on the money. Even the shining stars of transit in the US --- NYC MTA subway and CTA --- have huge qualuty of life issues. I can't fault someone for not wanting to ride trains ever again when someone who hasn't showered in 41 years pulls up with a cart full of whatever the fuck and decides to squat the corner seat closest to the car door and be a living biological weapon during…

[deleted]

Re: The Waymo World Model

#574

Post by madeofpalk »

scoofy wrote: post #318
caycep wrote: 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…

By various definitions of most people, most people do want to use public transit.

It's just that Cars have rotted the American mind so much that to consider anything else is sacrilege.

Re: The Waymo World Model

#575

Post by madeofpalk »

redox99 wrote: post #491
digbybk wrote: post #473

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

NYC people uses it because the alternatives are either slower or much more expensive. I'm sure they'd rather use a waymo if it was as fast and cheap as the subway.

I think the point is doubting whether it is ever possible for Waymo to ever be as fast or cheap as public transport in NYC.

Re: The Waymo World Model

#576

Post by essdas »

schiffern wrote: post #484
Mawr wrote: post #408

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

>Waymo is doing the thing. This worldview is overly simplistic. Waymo has (very shrewdly, for prospective investors at least) executed a strategy that most quickly scales to 0.1% of the population. Unfortunately it doesn't scale further. The cars are too costly and the mapping is too costly. There is no workable plan for significant scale from Waymo. Tesla is executing the strategy that most quickly scales to 100% of…

> most quickly scales to 0.1% of the population. Unfortunately it doesn't scale further

Data suggests that they’re already available to ~2% of the US population.

Re: The Waymo World Model

#577

Post by chippiewill »

cyanydeez wrote: post #245
robotresearcher wrote: post #217

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Human depth perception uses stereo out to only about 2 or 3 meters, after which the distance between your eyes is not a useful baseline. Beyond 3m we use context clues and depth from motion when available.

ok, but a care is a few meters wide, isn't that enough for driving depth perception similar to humans

The company I used to work for was developing a self driving car with stereo depth on a wide baseline.

It's not all sunshine and roses to be honest - it was one of the weakest links in the perception system. The video had to run at way higher resolutions than it would otherwise and it was incredibly sensitive to calibration accuracy.

Re: The Waymo World Model

#578

Post by ody4242 »

thefounder wrote: post #193
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…

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)

Yesterday GPT 5.2 wrote a python function for me that had the import in the middle of the code, for no reason. (It was a simple import of requests module in a REST client...) Claude I agree is a lot better for backend,Gemini is very good for frontend

Re: The Waymo World Model

#579

Post by cyanydeez »

robotresearcher wrote: post #467
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.

The width of your own vehicle is (pretty much) a constant, and trivial to know. Ford F150 is ~79.9 inches. Done. No sensors needed. All the shit out there in the world is another story.

You misundestood the assignment.

Write a sonnet about Elon musk.

Re: The Waymo World Model

#580

Post by rstuart4133 »

sdf2erf wrote: post #513
refulgentis wrote: post #496

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My dynamic range of professional experience is high, dropout => waiter => found startup => acquirer => Google. You're making an interesting point that I somewhat agree with from the perspective of someone was...clearly a little more feral than his surroundings in Google, and wildly succeeded and ultimately quietly failed because of it. The important bit is "great man" theory doesn't solve lack of dynamism. It usually…

Yeah people seem to be pretty poor at judging the impact of 'key' people. E.g. Steve Jobs was absolutely fundamental to the turn around of Apple. Will Brin have this level of incremental impact on the Goog/Alphabet of today? Nah.

The difference is: Apple had one "key person", Jobs, and yes the products he drove made the company successful. Now Jobs has gone I haven't seen anything new.

But if you look at Google, there isn't one key product. There are a whole pile of products that are best in class. Search (cringe, I know it's popular here to say Google search sucks and perhaps it does, but what search engine is far better?), YouTube, Maps, Android, Waymo, GMail, Deep Mind, the cloud infrastructure, translate, lens (OCR) and probably a lot of others I've forgotten. Don't forget Sheets and Docs, which while they have been replicated by Microsoft and others now were first done by Google. Some of them, like Maps, seem to have swapped entire teams - yet continued to be best in class. Predicting Google won't be at the forefront on the next advance seems perilous.

Maybe these products have key people as you call them, but the magic in Alphabet doesn't seem to be them. The magic seems to be Alphabet has some way to create / acquire these keep people. Or perhaps Alphabet just knows how to create top engineering teams that keep rolling along, even when the team members are replaced.

Apple produced one key person, Jobs. Alphabet seems to be a factory creating lots of key people moving products along. But as Google even manages to replace these key people (as they did for Maps) and still keep the product moving, I'm not sure they are the key to Googles success.

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