John Collison

We are planning to start operating in London and in Tokyo this year.

Do we have a driver that you're using today in San Francisco that we can just plop down in London and go?

No.

But what we're seeing is incredibly encouraging from the perspective of like, is the core technology there?

So now it's a matter of collecting the data, doing some specialization and validation.

Science are different.

You know, in both of those places, people drive on the other side of the road.

But, you know, that's actually not that hard for computers, right?

And core technology generalizes really well, but you still work that you have to do.

generalizes least well.

Increasingly, we're finding, especially now that we're able to kind of hook the Waymo AI to the AI in the digital world and the VLMs and kind of inherit the general world knowledge from VLMs, we're seeing really strong results from like zero-shot or few-shot learning because of that general knowledge that we bring in.

But there are a few things like

let's say, cold weather, cold winter weather, where it affects the entire stack, right?

So it's not just, you know, the AI, but you actually have to.

Hardware, yeah.

You need the hardware, you need to have the proper cleaning solution, you know, heating elements in it, and then you think about things that are completely solvable, but computers like motion control and slippery surfaces, right?

So that takes a bunch of work.

You don't get that for free from just, you know, pulling in some, you know, VLM decoder.

We usually think about it, you know, the capability of the wingman driver as well as deployment, not primarily and directly in that space of, you know, cities or zip codes.

I think about the operating domain.