Dmitri Dolgov: Waymo and the Future of Self-Driving Cars | Lex Fridman Podcast #147

The following is a conversation with Dmitry Dolgov, the CTO of Waymo, which is an autonomous driving company that started as Google Self-Driving Car Project in 2009, and became Waymo in 2016. Dmitry was there all along. Waymo's currently leading in the fully autonomous vehicle space, in that they actually have an at-scale deployment of publicly accessible autonomous vehicles driving passengers around with no safety driver, with nobody in the driver's seat. This, to me, is an incredible accomplishment of engineering on one of the most difficult and exciting artificial intelligence challenges of the 21st century. Quick mention of a sponsor, followed by some thoughts related to the episode. Thank you to Trial Labs, a company that helps businesses apply machine learning to solve real-world problems. Blinkist, an app I use for reading through summaries of books. BetterHelp, online therapy with a licensed professional. And Cash App, the app I use to send money to friends. Please check out these sponsors in the description to get a discount and to support this podcast. As a side note, let me say that autonomous and semi-autonomous driving was the focus of my work at MIT, and is a problem space that I find fascinating and full of open questions from both a robotics and a human psychology perspective. There's quite a bit that I could say here about my experiences in academia on this topic that revealed to me, let's say, the less admirable sides of human beings. But I choose to focus on the positive, on solutions, on brilliant engineers like Dmitry and the team at Waymo, who work tirelessly to innovate and to build amazing technology that will define our future. Because of Dmitry and others like him, I'm excited for this future. And who knows? Perhaps I, too, will help contribute something of value to it. If you enjoy this thing, subscribe on YouTube, review it with five stars on Apple Podcast, follow on Spotify, support on Patreon, or connect with me on Twitter @LexFridman. And now, here's my conversation with Dmitry Dolgov. When did you first fall in love with robotics, or even computer science, more in general?

Computer science first, at a fairly young age. Robotics happened much later. Um, I, uh, I think my first interesting introduction to computers was in the late '80s, uh, when we got our first computer. I think it was an, uh, an IBM, I think. IBM AT, I think. Remember those things that had, like, a turbo button in the front?

Turbo button? Yeah.

Where, where you would press it and, you know, make, make the thing goes faster.

Did they already have floppy disks?

Yeah. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, like the, the 5.4-inch ones.

I think there was a bigger inch. So good- went something, then five inches, then three inches.

Yeah, I think that was the five. I don't, I, maybe that was before that was the, the giant plates, and I didn't get that. Uh, but it was definitely not the, not the three-inch ones. Uh, anyway, so that, that, you know, we got that, uh, computer. I spent the first, uh, few months just, you know, playing video games, uh, as you would expect. I, uh, got bored of that, uh, so I, uh, started messing around and, uh, trying to figure out how to, you know, make the thing do other stuff. Got into, uh, exploring, you know, programming, and a couple of years later, it got to a point where, um, I actually wrote a game, uh, a, a little game.