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Posted by xnx 9 hours ago

The Waymo World Model(waymo.com)
648 points | 418 commentspage 3
tbmtbmtbmtbmtbm 2 hours ago|
so insane that this is the direction things are going, instead of just reducing our reliance on cars
NullHypothesist 8 hours ago||
I wonder if they can simulate the Beatles crossing the street at Abbey Road in the late '60s
seanhunter 8 hours ago|
As a Londoner who used to have to ride up Abbey Road at least once per week there are people on that crossing pretty much all day every day reproducing that picture. So now Waymo are in Beta in London[1] they have only to drive up there and they'll get plenty of footage they could use for taht.

[1] I've seen a couple of them but they're not available to hire yet and are still very rare.

permenant 6 hours ago||
Will Google finally fund Christopher Wren's post great fire "wide streets" rebuild of the City?
ddalex 5 hours ago||
i think we might need aother great fire to widen the streets at this point
ActorNightly 6 hours ago||
This is cool, but they are still not going about it the right way.

Its much easier to build everything into the compressed latent space of physical objects and how they move, and operate from there.

Everyone jumped on the end-2-end bandwagon, which then locks you into the input to your driving model being vision, which means that you have to have things like genie to generate vision data, which is wasteful.

sagarm 5 hours ago||
The article is about using the world model to generate simulations, not for controlling the vehicle.
senordevnyc 5 hours ago||
This is cool, but they are still not going about it the right way.

This is legit hilarious to read from some random HN account.

999900000999 7 hours ago||
It doesn't look like they're going to open sources or anything, but I could imagine this would be great for city planning.

Or the most realistic game of SimCity you could imagine.

londons_explore 3 hours ago||
Do wayno models really use side cameras at only like 4 FPS?
fabmilo 6 hours ago||
Very impressive work from Waymo. The driving with a tornado in the horizon example kind of struck my imagination, many people actually panic in such scenarios. I wonder though the compute requirements to run these simulations and producing so many data points.
pcurve 5 hours ago||
Dumb question - Why would Waymo disclose this much information to public and competitors?
xnx 4 hours ago||
It's easier to build trust for such a safety-critical service when you're more open about how it works an performs. For the complete opposite approach, see Tesla.
FuckButtons 4 hours ago|||
Given the announcement from a few days ago of google trying to get external investment, this is their follow up, showing what that investment is good for. Also, it’s pretty light on details that are of much use to competitors. “We made an accurate simulation system to test our system in before deployment” would be pretty mundane if you were talking about any other field of engineering.
wnevets 4 hours ago||
Maybe to distract from the story that they use remote drivers after one of their cars hit a kid? [1]

[1] https://people.com/waymo-exec-reveals-company-uses-operators...

edit: fixed kill -> hit

docere 4 hours ago|||
The child did not die, and suffered only minor injuries: https://abc7.com/post/california-teamsters-call-suspension-w...

Under the same circumstances (kid suddenly emerging between two parked cars and running out onto the street), it could be debated that the outcome could have been worse if a human were driving.

dan-g 4 hours ago|||
It’s awful a child was hit, but they only suffered minor injuries [1]. Nowhere in your linked article does it say they were killed.

[1] https://people.com/waymo-car-hits-child-walking-to-school-du...

t1234s 5 hours ago||
Could these world models be used to build some sort of endless GranTurismo type street racing game?
crazygringo 5 hours ago|
It seems inevitable that they'll soon be used as the starting points for developing almost all video game environments.

Not for the rendering (that's still way too expensive), but for the initial world generation that gets iteratively refined and then still ultimately gets converted into textured triangles.

mgaunard 8 hours ago||
Still needs to be trained on the final boss: dense cities with narrow streets.
reluctant_dev 8 hours ago||
San Francisco isn't uniformly dense and narrow, but it does have both, and it's run remarkably well so far.
elliotec 7 hours ago|||
Another comment mentioned the Philippines as the manifest frontier. SF is not on the same plane of reality in terms of density or narrow streets as PH, I would argue in comparison it does not have both.
smallmancontrov 6 hours ago||||
This is the craziest I've seen, but it was 10 months ago which is ~10 years in AI years

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3DWz1TD-VZg

fragmede 7 hours ago|||
On that specific count, not really. There's a skate park north end of the Mission, and Stevenson St is a two way road that borders it, but it's narrow enough that you need to drive up on the curb to get two vehicles side by side on the street. Waymo's can't handle that on a regular basis. Being San Francisco and not London, you can just skip that road, but if you find yourself in a Waymo on that street and are unlucky to have other traffic on it, the Waymo will just have to back up the entire street. Hope there's no one behind you as well as in front of you!

Anyway, we'll see how the London rollout goes, but I get the impression London's got a lot more of those kinds of roads.

mgaunard 1 hour ago|||
I live in London. Most residential streets are two-way but there is only space for one car, and driving on the curb is not really an option.

The trick to UK streets is that parking actually happens on the street itself, and when driving you must find a spot when people are not parking to make way for people coming the other way.

rootusrootus 6 hours ago|||
> Stevenson St is a two way road

That is extremely narrow, I wonder why the city has not designated it as a one-way street? They've done that for other similarly narrow sections of the same street farther north.

xnx 8 hours ago|||
What would be an example city? Waymo just announced they're ramping up in Boston: https://waymo.com/blog/?modal=short-back-to-boston

"we’re excited to continue effectively adapting to Boston’s cobblestones, narrow alleyways, roundabouts and turnpikes."

pants2 8 hours ago|||
Any small city in Italy is going to be 10X more challenging than Boston
threetonesun 8 hours ago|||
Depends, which is harder: a narrow street or a three lane one with no obvious lane markers with people double parking?
chasd00 4 hours ago||||
the absolute chaos of Paris would also be challenging.
micromacrofoot 7 hours ago|||
and the failure mode for some of them are steep drops off of cliffs
zhengyi13 8 hours ago||||
Various European cities come to mind: Narrow streets are something of a trope in certain movies/genres.
jkaptur 8 hours ago||
To be fair, many of those films do not portray human drivers in the best light.
ginko 8 hours ago|||
Not grandparent but I was rather thinking of medieval city centers in Italy or Spain.

edit: Case in point:

https://maps.app.goo.gl/xxYQWHrzSMES8HPL8

This is an alley in Coimbra, Portugal. A couple years ago I stayed at a hotel in this very street and took a cab from the train station. The driver could have stopped in the praça below and told me to walk 15m up. Instead the guy went all the way up then curved through 5-10 alleys like that to drop me off right right in front of my place. At a significant speed as well. It was one of the craziest car rides I've ever experienced.

stackedinserter 6 hours ago||
Do we really need FSD cars (any cars, actually) in medieval city centers?
breckinloggins 8 hours ago|||
I live in such an area. The route to my house involves steep topography via small windy streets that are very narrow and effectively one-way due to parked cars.

Human drivers routinely do worse than Waymo, which I take 2 or 3 times a week. Is it perfect? No. Does it handle the situation better than most Lyft or Uber drivers? Yes.

As a bonus: unlike some of those drivers the Waymo doesn't get palpably angry at me for driving the route.

dandaka 8 hours ago|||
Yes, something like Ho Chi Minh or Mumbai in a peak hour! With lots of bike riders, pedestrians, and livestock at the same roundabout.
throwaway_20357 7 hours ago|||
Like London? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KvctCbVEvwQ
pja 7 hours ago|||
Waymo cars are driving around London right now.

Not taking paying passengers yet though!

chpatrick 6 hours ago|||
They're being trialled in London right now.
seydor 8 hours ago|||
Napoli
kylehotchkiss 7 hours ago|||
Old Delhi is the the final boss.
renewiltord 7 hours ago||
Does it, though? Maybe Dhaka will never get Waymo. The same way you can’t get advanced gene therapy there.
anigbrowl 4 hours ago|
Seems relevant: Waymo exec admits remote operators in Philippines help guide US Robotaxis

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46918043

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