Waymo Co-CEO Dmitri Dolgov: The Demo Is Only 1% Of The Work
In a Nutshell
Waymo's co-CEO warns that a working demo represents only 1% of the effort needed to build a real physical AI product—getting the remaining "nines" of reliability requires fundamentally different approaches than achieving the first 90%. The critical lesson is that architecture choices, technology bets, and evaluation frameworks must be dictated by the exact number of nines required for safety-critical deployment, not by what's easiest to prototype. The company's success stems from building an integrated AI ecosystem (agent, simulator, critic) around a foundation model, using structure-augmented end-to-end learning, and earning trust through rigorous safety validation at scale—now achieving 17x better safety than humans across 220+ million autonomous miles.
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Good afternoon everyone. It's great to be here. We talk a lot about AI that lives on your screen, lives in the digital world. Today, let's talk about a different kind of AI being built at Waymo: AI that lives in the real physical world.
Many people in the audience have ridden in a Waymo. For those visiting who have not had a chance to check out Waymo, the invitation is to give it a try while in the Bay Area. This presentation is structured as a sequence of seven lessons learned over the years at Waymo around what it takes to build and safely ship today's most mature application of AI in the physical world: the Waymo driver.
A clip from a ride taken in a Waymo with kids shows moving forward through an intersection when a couple of human drivers cut in right in front. The Waymo driver reacted safely and smoothly. The kids in the back seat were preoccupied and didn't even notice that anything happened. This was a powerful moment after working on this technology for close to two decades. It acted safely, kept the kids safe, kept everybody safe, and nobody noticed. This will be a theme: for physical AI, the best AI moments will look like nothing happened. The task got done safely and smoothly. These moments where the Waymo driver kept everyone safe are happening daily across the fleet.
Today, the Waymo driver is serving around 500 trips per week and driving over 4 million fully autonomous miles every week in 15 cities across the United States. That's over 300 years every week of an average American driver per year. The Waymo driver is accomplishing that with a superhuman safety record.
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