Lex Fridman Podcast

#147 – Dmitri Dolgov: Waymo and the Future of Self-Driving Cars

Dec 20, 2020

02:28:50

Creator website

Highlights

AI Chapters

Episode notes

Is Machine Learning a Big Part of Waymo?

03:48

Waymo - The Google Self Driving Car Project

03:39

Is There Something Super Sexy About Waymo?

02:22

Introduction

3min

Trial Labs Review

4min

How Did You Get Your First Robotics Game?

3min

Is the Graphics Getting in the Way?

2min

Dreams of Being an Engineer

3min

What Was the Leap From Programming to Robotics?

2min

CCTF - What Was It Like as a Child?

2min

The DARPA Urban Challenge

3min

The DARPA Challenge

4min

10.

CMU Carnegie Mellon University

3min

11.

Waymo - The Google Self Driving Car Project

4min

12.

Zero Interventions - It Takes Two Years or More?

2min

13.

What Did You Learn From Waymo?

2min

14.

Waymo and Beyond - What Are the Next Milestones?

5min

15.

There's No Driver in the Driver's Seat

5min

16.

The Fifth Generation of Self-Driving Hardware?

2min

17.

Is There Something Super Sexy About Waymo?

2min

18.

Is There a No to GPUs?

2min

19.

Is There Something Interesting in the Challenges of Data Mining?

2min

20.

Connectivity - How Much Does It Help?

3min

21.

Waymo Customer Service

3min

22.

Fully Self - The Public Version of Waymo in Phoenix?

2min

23.

The Full Spectrum of Use Cases

2min

24.

How Do You Get Rich User Feedback to Improve?

4min

25.

Is AGI a Necessity?

4min

26.

How Do You Create Experience That People Love?

3min

27.

Waymo

3min

28.

Driving Autonomously

3min

29.

Waymo

4min

30.

Waymo Trucks - How Different Is It?

3min

31.

Is There a Difference Between Zero Occupancy Vehicle and Human Vehicle?

2min

32.

What Can You Ask a Better Question Than I Ask?

5min

33.

Phoenix X-Ease - What's That?

2min

34.

How Do You Copy Paste Into Google Docs?

3min

35.

Demetri, I'm Thinking About Moving to San Francisco of Austin

2min

36.

Public Service in a City? What About Moscow?

2min

37.

Is LiDAR a Crutch?

3min

38.

You Can Make LiDAR Sexy Again

2min

39.

How Much of Driving Can Be Learned?

3min

40.

Is There a Joint Fusion?

5min

41.

Is Machine Learning a Big Part of Waymo?

4min

42.

Safety of Viable Road Users, Pedestrians and Cyclists

3min

43.

Detecting Pedestrians in a Multi-Layer Environment

3min

44.

The Trolley Problem

2min

45.

Are There Difficult Ethical Decisions That an Algorithm Must Make?

3min

46.

Three Books That Influenced You in Your Life?

2min

47.

How Well Does Dostoyevsky Translate?

5min

48.

The Snail on a Hill

3min

49.

Love in Robots

2min

50.

What Is the Meaning of Life?

5min

51.

How to Make Machine Learning Work for You

2min

Dmitri Dolgov is the CTO of Waymo, an autonomous vehicle company. Please support this podcast by checking out our sponsors:
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EPISODE LINKS:
Waymo’s Twitter: https://twitter.com/waymo
Waymo’s Website: https://waymo.com

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OUTLINE:
Here’s the timestamps for the episode. On some podcast players you should be able to click the timestamp to jump to that time.
(00:00) – Introduction
(07:46) – Computer games
(12:52) – Childhood
(15:24) – Robotics
(16:14) – Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology
(18:26) – DARPA Urban Challenge
(28:46) – Waymo origin story
(44:27) – Waymo self-driving hardware
(53:00) – Connected cars
(58:53) – Waymo fully driverless service in Phoenix
(1:03:14) – Getting feedback from riders
(1:11:28) – Creating a product that people love
(1:17:18) – Do self-driving cars need to break the rules like humans do?
(1:24:03) – Waymo Trucks
(1:29:41) – Future of Waymo
(1:42:53) – Role of lidar in autonomous driving
(1:55:53) – Machine learning is essential for autonomous driving
(1:59:55) – Pedestrians
(2:06:32) – Trolley problem
(2:11:00) – Book recommendations
(2:22:26) – Meaning of life