The System Behind Self-Driving: Waymo’s Dmitri Dolgov

Waymo is now delivering hundreds of thousands of fully autonomous rides each week — but getting there required more than better models. It meant building a complete system for training, evaluating, and deploying a driver in the real world.

In this episode — originally aired on the Cheeky Pint podcast — Waymo Co-CEO Dmitri Dolgov joins John Collison to break down how self-driving actually works today: from sensor fusion across LiDAR, radar, and cameras, to simulation, “critic” models, and the role of AI in decision-making.

They also explore why full autonomy is fundamentally different from driver-assist, what it takes to scale globally, and how recent advances in AI are reshaping the path forward.

Resources:

Follow Dmitri Dolgov on X - https://x.com/dmitri_dolgov

Follow John Collison on X - https://x.com/collision

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