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- Hacker News
- they now are doing a 5nm asic, what did they have before this?by htrp
- Waymo has never disclosed this information.by red75prime
- Interesting that the article uses "ML" everywhere instead of "AI". I'm sure some marketing person chose that term deliberately, and I wonder what went into that decision.by munificent
- First of all, machine learning is a distinct category of A.I., so they are being more specific about their methods. If we get right down to it, "A.I." is, and has always been, a nearly meaningless buzzword that means whatever you want it to mean. In 2026 it is highly stigmatized by haters, anyway. So I appreciate that a techblog endeavors to explain exactly what sort of A.I. they're employing in these systems.
- Apple did exactly the same thing a few years back:
Apple avoids “AI” hype at WWDC keynote by baking ML into products (2023)
https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2023/06/at-ap...
by jerlam - All of the industry leaders of AI can’t stop bragging about how their AI is committing what would be felonies if a human did it, warning that it’s about as likely as not that AI will literally lead to human extinction, and threatening that it will erase all white collar work (or not depending on the day) and investing resources in a manner that will only be worthwhile if it actually does.
I don’t think there’s any mystery as to why AI is not a good marketing term.
by nxc18 - > Redundant: Because there is no human to take over, proactive safety and redundancy are natively built in. Our compute is designed like two independent engines. While they normally operate as one unit running full parallel workloads, if one experiences a fault, the other seamlessly takes over.
uhhh i've been in a situation where a remote human took over before
it's rare but it can happen (or at least it could 1.5 years ago-ish)
the specific situation was a tight alleyway with cars parked on either side and people doing things like opening car doors and crossing randomly. the waymo obviously wanted a much wider safety margin than what was available and stopped to wait for things to clear up. the remote human driver instead drove more aggressively towards the pedestrians so they would clear the road.
by novia - They mean no human at the wheel to take over if the hardware dies. If you are driving full speed down the highway and your gpu packs up, you’d better have a backup to bring the vehicle to a safe stop.by Chirono
- Waymo has zero "remote human drivers". It is literally impossible to "drive" a Waymo by remote commands.
The Waymo agents are constantly monitoring the fleet for exceptions. When an exception is raised, a human reviews the footage and the situation. They can send commands to the car and suggestions about which way to branch or a course of action to choose. So ultimately, it is the Waymo Driver doing the actual driving.
If a Waymo gets really jammed up, they can indeed send in a human driver, who will appear in person, disengage the Waymo Driver automation, and drive the car normally. This has happened to me only once in 3,000 miles. The Waymo Driver, in my experience, is pretty good about keeping passengers informed when it's a bit delayed or confused by a complex situation. And the CSR will call in if they need to.
But no, it is a misconception that people have: Waymos cannot be "driven remotely" by any means.
- Would love to get them in nycby belinder
- Contact you mayorby xnx
- I'm very open to being wrong about this, but will they actually work in NYC? Waymo requires some grace from other drivers and pedestrians in order to function and I just can't imagine New Yorkers will offer it.
Do you think they will?
by cco - I thought that was stalled because the mayor didn't like it?[0] Any new developments?
> New York abandoned its proposal to allow self-driving taxis earlier this year. New York City’s new mayor, Zohran Mamdani, has said he would heavily weigh the interests of taxi drivers in deciding on rules for the technology.
0: https://www.nytimes.com/2026/06/17/technology/waymo-driverle...
by arjie - Odd. I didn’t see any photos in the trunk or the compute bays, did anyone else?by kotaKat
- I've been wanting to start the hashtag #gohomewaymoURdrunk for when it gives me stupid routes like circling the block pointlessly or when dropoff is stupidly far from my destination. (firstworldproblems except for when I sprained my ankle). Anyone else on board?by fragmede
- It really doesn't say much. Tesla had more detailed talks on their HW and AI stack. This reads like a glorified marketing blurb.by ACCount37
- Recruitingby slashdave
- That's exactly what this is, a marketing blurb. Was this unclear?by dima55
- Very cool. To be honest, I'd assumed they were using commodity hardware, but no real reason for that. Cool chip. It is quite interesting that so many large companies have their own chips for these things. I almost managed to get my hands on a couple of accidentally liquidated MTIA chips but I was too slow. I wonder what the chip is like and what the dev experience is writing for it.
It would just be cool to see what these guys have cooked up dev tools wise since Google has always been famed for good developer experience (often to such a degree that Xooglers are useless outside the exosuit).
by arjie - Downside of the MTIA chips is no open backend - so quite a lift to get them working if possible at all :(by buildbot
- REing Meta's custom AI HW to get it running with something would be one hell of a project, and one hell of a flex.
It would rely on them being nice enough to leave at least some binaries on the thing though. Because I'm not sure how would one even get an in on how to boot the things without.
by ACCount37 - >high-fidelity data from 13 high-resolution cameras
is it me or their example photo doesn't look even like 1 high-resolution camera (and very noisy at that, looks like a pretty high ISO setting). Their example looks similar and i'd say a bit worse than what my Fuji camera did 25 years ago in the dark after i'd adjust dynamic range of the image in GIMP. (and the cameras on the Waymo cars i see around have about the same lens size as my Fuji)
If it is really a showcase of their visual pipeline than it makes sense that they are still so reliant on lidar - which is pretty expensive because of the number of rays you have to support to maintain good situation-awareness and which is still hard and expensive to scale to get good resolution. That also means that their tech can't really be put onto other platforms like drones for example.
by trhway - That night image looks very heavily cropped based on the field of view.by Chirono
- Absolutely not an expert on this, but I would imagine that they would train the pipeline on a raw-ish image data to have better consistency? I would think that some kind of algorithm "bettering" the image suddenly might cause a discontinuation in the pipeline that is harder to account for versus the ML machinery being trained to do this job as well.
Also, what looks good to us may not be "good" to a machine.
But I'm really just guessing in the dark here.
by gf000 - The more I think about it the more autonomous cars look like extremely demanding edge computers. You have limited power and cooling, unreliable connectivity and very strict latency requirements. It's probably one of the few places where designing the hardware around the workload makes more sense than trying to make a general purpose platform do everythingby tehnoslow
- A self-driving car is an "AI robotics" platform.
Both self-driving car and general purpose AI robots are emerging technologies right now. My bet is that eventually, the HW will converge accordingly.
by ACCount37 - They really are the impressive tech, it's really a shame that they aren't the one capturing all the media spotlight.
I don't know if we'll get there eventually, but if we do, I won't be surprised if it's because of Waymo.
by p-o - It's been 16 years since Google announced they were working on driverless cars. Waymo's been offering service to the public for six years. There's been plenty of news coverage and people already know about them. Being in the spotlight all the time just wears people out.by skybrian
- >it's really a shame that they aren't the one capturing all the media spotlight
This does seem at least a bit intentional on Waymo’s part. They appear to have adopted an under promise, over deliver mindset (unlike some other robotaxi alternatives that come to mind). They’ve seen a lot of their competitors (Uber, Cruise, etc) capture a lot of ultimately negative attention and folded as a result; I would probably try to avoid the limelight if I were them too. The tech speaks for itself.
by derektank - Riding in one is pretty mind-blowing at first. But what's more shocking is how fast you get used to it. After a while it's just a boring car ride.
I wish more people would experience it and see that the future is now.
by kilroy123