Waymo Offers A Peek Under Their AI Hood And Keeps Growing

While the rest of us have been marveling at ChatGPT's conversational abilities, Waymo has been quietly using similar artificial intelligence breakthroughs to teach cars how to drive themselves. The Google subsidiary recently revealed details about their "Waymo Foundation Model," a massive AI system that learns everything about driving before teaching smaller, car-sized AI models how to navigate real streets.

Unlike Tesla's "end-to-end" approach that feeds raw camera footage directly into AI systems, Waymo takes a hybrid route. Their system processes both images and text like a sophisticated chatbot, but instead of predicting the next word in a sentence, it predicts where other cars, pedestrians, and cyclists will move next.

The company has trained this AI teacher using data from over 100 million real-world driving miles, then deployed student versions that fit inside actual vehicles now operating in nine cities. Waymo continues expanding across the US while competitors lag behind, making this AI revolution on wheels feel less like science fiction and more like an inevitable commute.