Subvolts take Waymo's journey shows AI's slow but steady progress toward real-world safety and scale. May 4, 2026 - Developers
- Learn how a leading AV company builds and scales complex AI systems for real-world deployment.
- Business
- Understand the long-term investment and safety focus required for disruptive AI technologies like autonomous driving.
- Everyday users
- See how AI is making transportation safer and more advanced, with a focus on Waymo's progress.
This interview provides a detailed look at a leader in autonomous driving technology and its progress.
Waymo's Dmitri Dolgov: 20 Million Rides and the Road to Full Autonomy
Audio streams from Sequoia Capital. Your place is remembered on this device.
From Subvolts
Summary and analysis by Subvolts editorial, AI-assisted.
Sequoia partner Konstantine Buhler interviews Waymo co-CEO Dmitri Dolgov about the company's 20-year journey to fully autonomous driving. Dolgov discusses Waymo's safety focus, exponential scaling with 20 million rides completed, and the Waymo Foundation Model. He highlights Waymo's safety record, now 13 times better than human drivers, and shares an anecdote about detecting a pedestrian via LiDAR.
Waymo's co-CEO talks about their self-driving car technology, which has now driven 20 million miles. He explains how they prioritize safety and how their AI is getting much better, making their cars much safer than human drivers. This technology could change how we travel.
This episode offers insight into the long-term development and current achievements of a leading autonomous vehicle company. It's for anyone interested in the practical application of AI in robotics and transportation. Listeners will learn how Waymo navigates the complex path to autonomy, focusing on safety and scaling. This connects to frontier labs' work on real-world AI deployment, particularly in areas requiring high reliability and complex perception, like autonomous systems and advanced robotics.
- HostSequoia Capital
- GuestDmitri Dolgovco-CEO, Waymo
- Guest: Dmitri Dolgov, co-CEO of Waymo
- Show: Training Data (an official AI show)
- Length: 27 minutes
- Total Rides: 20 million
- Recent Rides: 10 of 20 million rides in the last seven months
- Safety Comparison: 13x safer than human drivers
Dmitri Dolgov, co-CEO of Waymo, joins Sequoia partner Konstantine Buhler at AI Ascent 2026 to talk about the 20-year arc from the DARPA Grand Challenge to fully autonomous service in eleven cities and counting. He explains how Waymo persisted through every AV hype cycle by treating safety as the non-negotiable foundation, why exponential scaling is finally here (10 of Waymo's 20 million autonomous rides have happened in the last seven months), and how the Waymo Foundation Model — a multimodal world action model that powers the driver, the simulator, and the critic — actually works under the hood. Also: why Waymo is now 13x safer than human drivers, and the moment a Waymo detected a pedestrian behind a city bus by reading the LiDAR returns of their feet.
- LiDAR
- Dmitri Dolgov
- A sensor that uses lasers to measure distances and create a 3D map of the surroundings.
- multimodal world action model
- Dmitri Dolgov
- An AI system that understands and acts on different types of information, like vision and sensor data, to navigate the world.
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Questions people ask
- How safe are Waymo's autonomous vehicles?
- Waymo is now 13 times safer than human drivers, according to the episode.
- What is the Waymo Foundation Model?
- It is a multimodal world action model that powers Waymo's driver, simulator, and critic.
Page generated Oct 19, 2026. Summaries are Subvolts' own; the audio, artwork and notes belong to Sequoia Capital.