Ben Gilbert: belief

Transcript context

…And as a regular user of both products, happy owner and driver of a model Y in addition to a regular Waymo user, at least with the current instantiation of full self-driving on my Tesla, vastly different products. Full self-driving on my Model Y is great. I use it all the time on the freeway, but I would never not pay attention. Whereas every time I get in a Waymo, it’s almost like Google search. I just trust that oh, this is going to be completely and totally safe. I’m sitting in the backseat and I can totally tune out. I think I trust my Model Y FSD more than you do, but I get what you’re saying. And frankly, regulatorily, you are required to still pay attention in Tesla and not in the Waymo. The safety thing is super real, though. If you look at the numbers, over a million motor vehicle crashes cause fatalities every year, or there are over a million fatalities. In the US alone, over 40,000 deaths occur per year. If you break that down, that’s 120 every day. That’s a giant cause of death. The study that Waymo just released last month showed that they have 91% fewer crashes with serious injuries or worse compared to the average human driver, even controlled for the fact that Waymos right now are only driving on city surface streets. They controlled it apples to apples with human driving data, and it’s a 91% reduction in those serious either fatality or serious injury things. Why aren’t we all talking about this all the time every day? This is going to completely change the world in a giant cause of death. So while we’re in Waymo land, what do you think about doing some quick analysis? Because I’ve been scratching my head here of what is this business. And then I promise we’ll go back to the rest of Google AI and catch up to today. It is super expensive to operate, especially at early scale. The training is high, the inference is high, the hardware is high, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. Also, the operations are expensive.…

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