A look under our trunk: what's in our compute (waymo.com)
50 points by ra7 a day ago
xnx an hour ago
Apologies for repeating myself, but it's hard to convey how far ahead Waymo is in every area: sensors, vehicles, training data, markets served, simulation, infrastructure, operations, regulatory.
They're growing fast, but I do wonder what they see as the bottlenecks: municipal approval, training, manufacturing? It's really unfortunate that lobbying is slowing self-driving rollout in some of the biggest and most important cities: NYC, Chicago, DC.
arjie 17 minutes ago
Very cool. To be honest, I'd assumed they were using commodity hardware, but no real reason for that. Cool chip. It is quite interesting that so many large companies have their own chips for these things. I almost managed to get my hands on a couple of accidentally liquidated MTIA chips but I was too slow. I wonder what the chip is like and what the dev experience is writing for it.
It would just be cool to see what these guys have cooked up dev tools wise since Google has always been famed for good developer experience (often to such a degree that Xooglers are useless outside the exosuit).
p-o 2 hours ago
They really are the impressive tech, it's really a shame that they aren't the one capturing all the media spotlight.
I don't know if we'll get there eventually, but if we do, I won't be surprised if it's because of Waymo.
kilroy123 2 hours ago
Riding in one is pretty mind-blowing at first. But what's more shocking is how fast you get used to it. After a while it's just a boring car ride.
I wish more people would experience it and see that the future is now.
SeanAnderson 33 minutes ago
It's beyond boring after a bit.
It reminds me of putting on noise-cancelling headphones in an already quiet room. You suddenly gain an appreciation for just how much quieter things could've been thanks to the contrast.
Similarly, having a vehicle accelerate/decelerate consistently, always taking turns with the same sharpness, etc.. all of it builds to this subtle feeling of the car ride fading into the background of the experience. You didn't realize those were features of a drive you could appreciate until experienced.
hollow-moe an hour ago
Compute is under the trunk ??? Noted. At the price of RAM nowadays it's like the new copper !
belinder 41 minutes ago
Would love to get them in nyc
arjie 15 minutes ago
I thought that was stalled because the mayor didn't like it?[0] Any new developments?
> New York abandoned its proposal to allow self-driving taxis earlier this year. New York City’s new mayor, Zohran Mamdani, has said he would heavily weigh the interests of taxi drivers in deciding on rules for the technology.
0: https://www.nytimes.com/2026/06/17/technology/waymo-driverle...
htrp 37 minutes ago
they now are doing a 5nm asic, what did they have before this?