Waymo is experimenting with generative AI and other technologies for its self-driving cars, but the company believes the assortment of laser sensors and radars mounted on its cars remains the safest way to run a robotaxi service at scale—at least for now.
“We’ve done a lot of research. We’re aware of what works and what doesn’t work at our scale and what we need to do,” Srikanth Thirumalai, who is vice president of onboard engineering for the current robotaxi industry incumbent, Waymo, said this week at the Ai4 Conference in Las Vegas.
Thirumalai was speaking on stage in an interview with Fortune. Earlier that day, Thirumalai gave a solo presentation, describing Waymo’s AI stack and approach to safety in detail that has allowed the company to scale its operation to five cities by mid-2025 and conduct more than 100 million driverless miles. In his presentation, Thirumalai showed a video of how LiDAR sensors on the Waymo Jaguar I-PACE had picked up movement from human beings readying to jump in the road, even when the vehicle’s cameras had not—or a woman preparing to go around a stopped bus and directly into the path of a Waymo robotaxi. In both instances, Waymo’s robotaxi stopped or maneuvered out of the way to avoid contact with the pedestrians, according to the videos.
“If we are talking about objective measures, then we have to look at the statistics of our safety record, at scale, right?” Thirumalai said. “When someone actually says: Yes, we matched your safety at your scale with a different system, that’s great. We’ll take that.”
Thirumalai said incorporating generative AI models into the self-driving tech stack is an area of “intense research,” and that he believes this will continue. “But there’s a lot more work that’s going to be needed to make the system as simple as possible,” he said.
