Waymo CEO Dmitri Dolgov on emergent behaviors he's seen from AI:
"I've had some moments where a car does something and I look at the log and have been surprised. It does things that I didn't think it was capable of doing."
"When you build a system and you think you understand how it works and you understand fully the limits of its capability and performance, and then it does something—almost magical—it's exhilarating."
"One example I can give you... it happened in San Francisco, fairly benign situation. We're at an intersection, the light is red, and there's cross traffic. A bus goes by and stops, partially blocking our light. The light turns green. We start to go, nudging around the bus—and then you see a pedestrian being detected on the other side of the bus."
"The first time I looked at that log, I was like, 'What's going on here?'"
"We have pretty darn good sensors and the software is very capable, but we don't see through stuff."
"What actually turned out was happening was that our peripheral lidars bounced under the bus, and there was just a little bit of very noisy reflection of the movement of the person's feet—that was enough for the AI models to say, 'Likely, there's a pedestrian there.'"
"There was enough data there to predict what they were going to do. It kinda blew my mind."
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