Wayve grades driving across four dimensions

Transcript

Transcribed by machine (Whisper) from the episode’s audio, so a word may be off here and there.

1. 2:43

   scenarios, weather conditions throughout the entire world, which is what Wave focuses on literally everywhere. Tell me a little bit more about safety. Why is safety such a difficult engineering problem? Yeah. So, I mean, let's start today with the status quo. The status quo today for driving is not great. It is a very risky thing that we do. It's costly in terms of time, but also just insurance costs for minor accidents. And then, you know, we don't even need to motivate the major safety challenges and the populations affected by vehicular accidents in the United States everywhere throughout the world.

2. 3:20

   So it is, I think, incumbent upon us as engineers, as scientists, as product managers, researchers to think about how we improve all of those problems. So it kind of is one of those things that really, I think, needs no motivation. and why it's such an intent focus for WAVE. Well, I mean, it's a focus of every self-driving car company out there, whether you're working on L2 or L4. We have this novel approach to self-driving that we refer to as AV2.0 or end-to-end systems.

3. 3:51

   And there hasn't been a lot of rigorous thinking yet about how we prove the safety of those systems. It's exactly the same problem. that folks at Anthropic and OpenAI think about when they're thinking about frontier safety, how do they prove that what the model is outputting is correct, performance, not going to mislead you, not going to deceive you, aligned with human expectations. It's the same problem, but the physical interpretation of it. So there isn't this golden North Star benchmark for what this means. What does that look like when you're trying to innovate at the Frontier to define what safety means? Yeah, so many things. So we break it down into four core concepts. So safety, of course, has to do with the safety of road users outside of the car, but also the people in the car. There's a comfort element, which is sometimes safety related or

4. 4:46

   adjacent. You know, if you're heartbreaking or swerving or things like that, doing uncomfortable things, sometimes those are precursors of safety. Honestly, equally important is compliance. So there is a dizzying array of traffic rules throughout the world how you behave with certain signs in japan versus in um uh germany is quite different because you're doing london and all across literally everywhere quite literally everywhere when we're operating like we've done with our uh road show last year um in the arctic circle or um just around the world it's it's crazy how different it is and regulators and our customers expect that we're performing safely, comfortably, compliantly, and competently, meaning that when you ask the car to do a lane change, it does it in a way that people expect. Now, your question is, well, how do we grade all

5. 5:36

   those things? And that is the challenge. And there's no one answer. There's no one metric just in the way that you go to any AI leaderboard today. There's a ton of different metrics, but we try our very best to make sure that those metrics are aligned with human expectation, our expectation