When you're driving around, or being driven around, say, we think about what we're building as a driver.

I can imagine building a big model that understands how the physical world works and understands the important properties of what it means to drive, the social aspects of driving, and what it means to be a good driver

as opposed to that one.

I would say that we've clearly moved past the stage of scientific research and deep

core technology development to this new phase of accelerated global scaling and deployment.

Waymo is now doing nearly half a million fully autonomous rides a week across multiple cities,

a shift from long-term research to real-world scale.

In this episode, originally aired on the Cheeky Pint podcast, Waymo co-CEO CEO Dmitri Delgov joins John Collison

to break down how they built the system behind it, from the sensor stack in why LiDAR still

matters, to the role of simulation and critic models in training the AI. They also get into

why driver assist won't naturally evolve into full autonomy,

what it takes to scale globally and how the product itself is changing,

from custom-built vehicles to entirely new economies of ride-hailing.

Dimitri Dolgav is co-CEO of Waymo.

He joined Google's self-driving car project 2009 as one of its first engineers and was repeatedly promoted until he took it over in 2021.

Waymo is Google's most successful moonshot and now provides over 500,000 fully autonomous rides each week.

Cheers, by the week. Yeah, cheers.

You grew up in Russia, right? I grew up in Russia.

Then I was actually a Soviet Union. Right, right, exactly.

My dad is a physicist, so the Soviet Union started falling apart, and then he got, had a

position, a visiting position in University, in Kyoto University for a year. We moved there as a family,

and then he went to Berkeley, and I kind of tagged along. And then I ran out of, you know, I graduated

...