Dmitri Dolgov: belief

Transcript context

…When you see emergent behavior, that's a proud moment? One example, yeah. When you build a system, and then 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, I think I've shared some videos of that publicly in some talks, was this example where the situation that happened in San Francisco. A fairly benign situation where at an intersection, our light is red, there's near cross traffic, a bus goes by, and it stops partially blocking the lane. Our light turns green, so we start to go. We're nudging around the bus, and then you see a pedestrian being detected on the other side of the bus. Then your car responds appropriately, it slows down, goes a little bit wider, and then a pedestrian actually emerges from the bus, and we go on our own. The first time I looked at that log, I was like, "What's going on here?" I know we have pretty darn good sensors, and the software is very capable, but we don't see through stuff. That's not how cameras or LiDARs and radars work. It saw the pedestrian through the bus?…

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