Dmitri Dolgov: prediction

Transcript context

…I have a few more questions, but I'm curious to talk about Google's relationship with… Self-driving where, again, it feels like right now, Waymo is, aside from everything else AI-related, the most exciting thing happening at Google, but it was a very long journey to get here. I feel like you could say that Google almost started working on it too early because you were saying there's been a bunch of recent enabling technologies, and so did it require Google starting when it did so early, or could one have spun up this project in 2015, 2020? Then, how did Google keep the faith when it almost felt like it was perennially two years away? Yeah, on the latter part, I just have to give credit, huge kudos and gratitude to Larry and Sergey and Alphabet's leadership in our company. It is part of the culture and the DNA of the company is to have that vision and have the stamina and conviction to go the distance. To the other part of the question, was it too early? I don't know. I think what we've been seeing, clearly, all of the breakthroughs that we've seen over the years have changed how we're building the system. But the complexity of the problem is such that you need to go through these iterative cycles. We've seen many waves of technology. There were breakthroughs in 2013, ImageNet came around. There was this narrative, "Okay, that is the right time to start or be a self-driving company." Then transformers came around and VLMs. All of those are super powerful. You have applications in other spaces. In the digital world, they certainly have an impact on our AI in the physical world. But there are no silver bullets. They drastically reshape that early part of the curve. It's always been the nature of this problem. It's very easy to get started. It's deceptively easy to get started. But it is super hard to go the full distance. Edge case... It's the number of nines. There's the standard engineering rule of thumb that every next nine takes 10x more. Yeah, maybe there is a more optimal path, but I don't see that there's some magical moment where the true complexity of the problem goes away, and then you can just take some off-the-shelf components under your business. If that were the case, then I think the industry would look very different today. Last question I have. You've been promoted a lot at Google. It feels like Google really recognized your talents. Just what do you think Google does? Google is famously one of the very best in the world at technical talent and say, the current AI wave more broadly happening, is either stuff happening at Google or generally Google alumni. But just what have you observed firsthand from how Google does this so well?…

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