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The Waymo World Model

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Re: The Waymo World Model

#611

Post by Zigurd »

The amount to which supposedly engineering based rationales are applied to Elon's decisions is cult like behavior. Here's what's really going on:

That thing I called full self driving just to troll government regulators? Just make it work and don't complain about what I called it.

That rocket that's way too big for orbital payloads but can't go beyond orbit without sending 20 more rockets full of fuel? Just make it work. Occupy Mars!

The two car models that work and have a halo effect on the rest of the product line? I'mma cancel that! Just make the stupid truck we're keeping work!

We've all had a boss like that. I'm sure they salute each other.

Re: The Waymo World Model

#612

Post by wslh »

belter wrote: post #464
hosh wrote: post #302

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

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

What's striking is the sheer scale of Epstein's and Maxwell's scheduling and access. The source material makes it hard to even imagine how two people could sustain that many meetings/parties/dinners/victims, across so many places, with such high-profile figures. And, how those figures consistently found the time to meet them.

Re: The Waymo World Model

#613

Post by GuB-42 »

mr_toad wrote: post #505
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.

> The cost is not even that significant compared to the overall cost of a Tesla. That’s true now, but when they first debuted they would have doubled the cost of the car.

When Tesla debuted, the cost of batteries made electric cars more like an expensive novelty. The Tesla roadster certainly was fun, but it wasn't a practical car for day-to-day use.

Of course, things have changed.

Had Tesla gone all-in on Lidar, they could have turned the technology into a commodity, they are a trillion dollar company producing a million cars a year. Lidar is already present on cheap robot vacuum cleaners, and we have time-of-flight cameras in smartphones, I don't believe it would have been a problem to equip $50k cars with Lidar.

Re: The Waymo World Model

#614

Post by VivaTechnics »

Similar to Kiva Systems which was Amazon's best acquisition, Waymo is simply Google's best acquisition. (We live in San Francisco and it feels much safer around these Waymo cars than average "drivers".)

Re: The Waymo World Model

#615

Post by qeternity »

Have there been any reported instances of Waymo cars being stolen?

Disabled and then loaded into a lead-lined trailer or something.

I imagine the IP running locally on the cars is worth billions.

Re: The Waymo World Model

#616

Post by theptip »

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…

So is this a model baked into the VLLM layer? Or a scaffold that the agent sits in for testing?

If the former then it’s relevant to the broader discourse on LLM generality. If the latter, then it seems less relevant to chatbots and business agents.

Edit to add: this is not part of the model, it’s in a separate pillar (Simulator vs Driver). More at https://waymo.com/blog/2025/12/demonstrably-safe-ai-for-auto....

Re: The Waymo World Model

#618

Post by theptip »

burgreblast wrote: post #374
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…

I never get the moaning about killing Reader. It was never about popularity or user experience. Reader had to be killed because it [was seen as] a suboptimal ad monetization engine. Page views were superior. Was Google going to support minimizing ads in any way?

Right. Reader was not a case of apathy and failure to see the product’s value.

It was Google clearly seeing the product’s value, and killing it because that value was detrimental to their ads business.

Re: The Waymo World Model

#619

Post by magguzu »

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…

Is that a public transit problem or a societal/homelessness problem?

Re: The Waymo World Model

#620

Post by bsnnkv »

caycep wrote: post #265

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

Pretty much this. Wild that you can traverse most of China in affordable high speed trains, yet the Amtrak from Seattle to Portland barely crawls along and has to regularly stop for long periods of time because the tracks get too hot in the Summer.
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