Demonstrably Safe AI For Autonomous Driving - CleanTechnica

The article from CleanTechnica details Waymo’s approach to achieving demonstrably safe AI for autonomous driving, emphasizing safety as the foundational principle rather than an afterthought. Waymo has driven over 100 million fully autonomous miles, demonstrating a significant reduction in crashes with serious injuries compared to human drivers. Their AI ecosystem is built around a holistic strategy that integrates a Driver (the AI system controlling the vehicle), a Simulator for realistic closed-loop training and testing, and a Critic that evaluates performance and guides improvements. These components are unified by the Waymo Foundation Model, which enables continuous learning and safety validation at scale. The Waymo Foundation Model serves as the cornerstone of their AI system, combining the benefits of both end-to-end and modular AI architectures. It uses learned embeddings and structured representations (such as objects and road elements) to ensure correctness and safety during inference, efficient large-scale simulation, and strong feedback for training. The model employs a dual architecture known as Think Fast and Think Slow: a Sensor Fusion