Sundar Pichai: belief

Transcript context

…I think Waymo is a good example of this question I have, which is Google does cut projects, and there's various things you've tried where you said, "We're actually not going to fund this part of X all the way, or we're going to retire this product. It's not working." But Waymo, despite the fact that it was a long road from a compelling demo to commercial service in market, you guys didn't lose the faith. What was it that you were seeing? Is that a qualitative decision or a quantitative decision? How do you decide that we're going to cut Loon but keep Waymo? I think it's to do with that, some quantified… You look at the Waymo driver. That's the underlying technology, which how does the software drive the car? The progress in terms of safety and reliability. It's a long-running task, how safe and how will you do it. You follow that curve, and you predict, or you set goals where you want to be and how you perform against those curves. I think the team has been phenomenal. There have been maybe phases where it didn't progress, but those are the times you need to… You have confidence in the quality of the team to break through those phases. I think the more you're able to evaluate things at that deeper technology level, I think you tend to make those decisions better, or at least that's how I have tried to do it. One argument I've heard or one discussion I've heard made about Waymo is that a lot of the huge gains that have been seen recently... Because it used to be this hand-mapped heuristics of how do you deal with the edge cases of driving or something happens, how do you respond? A subset of those were almost like hand-drawn out for the cars to follow. It had a narrow set of things that it could do. Then really, the breakthrough was moving to end-to-end deep learning a couple of years ago as this big Transformer wave was happening in general. Do you think if Waymo had been started five years ago, it'd be at the same place as it is relative to having been started 15 plus years ago? Just given that that's the breakthrough that's propelled it forward.…

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