Sundar Pichai: belief

Transcript context

…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. Look, I think we spoke earlier about robotics. You can think about Waymo as a robot. I think people who are starting robotics in the last three years, by definition, will be making faster progress, maybe. But I think Waymo is such an integrated system. There are aspects of it, not quite like you take something complex like TSMC or SpaceX launching things. You are talking about system integration in these things in a very complex way. I think Waymo has hidden aspects of that, which the time of how you do it, the craft of it matters. But having said that, I do think the end-to-end approaches are going to be an accident in this case. Because just having a team, arguably, was a huge benefit to Alphabet and Google. Just the fact that you kept investing in it, and then it hit a moment in time where this technology lift-off was more than worth it, and was very smart and forward-thinking. I just think it's interesting to ask, how does that apply to other domains? Because to your point on robotics, it seems like with robotics, we'll potentially have a different history where you can move very quickly now. Do you folks think about re-internalizing hardware again, or is it largely going to be a partner-driven model to bringing this stuff to the world?…

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