?? Inside Wayve’s self-driving car as it tackles awful traffic

A couple of weeks ago, I joined AI researcher turned co-founder and CEO of autonomous driving startup Wayve , Alex Kendall , for a test drive on a really difficult road in London. Wayve has been on my mind for a long time, and we wrote about it in EV#443 in the context of their most recent achievement — Alex’s team has created a 9-billion parameter world model called GAIA-1 to train their autonomous driving systems. Wayve uses synthetic training data, AI-generated driving situations, and prompting to enhance the driving capabilities.

I was blown away by the experience in the passenger seat. We drove on some of the toughest roads in London, and the system navigated the traffic — humans, cars, roadworks and even a police intervention — safely, smoothly, and with no human input.

See it for yourself in this brief video of our ride:

Alex and I later went back to his office where we recorded an hour-long conversation going under the hood of the technology, and Wayve's business model. You can listen to our full conversation here:

We cover:

• ??? Alex’s journey from being a researcher to pioneering AI in transportation, inspired by groundbreaking AI achievements in other fields.
• ??? The shift from traditional rule-based AI systems to dynamic, data-driven, end-to-end learning models in autonomous vehicles, mirroring trends seen in LLMs like GPT-3.
• ??? “Embodied AI” and its role in shaping future everyday assistance, beyond just digital interactions.
• ???Implementing AI in complex, unstructured environments like road traffic, and why Wayve’s approach using deep learning is paving a new path.
• ??? The significance of scaling laws in AI development, and how they enable autonomous vehicles to handle edge cases and improve performance exponentially.
• ???Alex’s perspective on Level 5 automation (fully autonomous vehicles) and why that might be a distraction to the opportunity.
• ???The evolving business models in the automotive industry, shifting towards AI integration and subscription-based services.

This conversation isn’t just a technical deep dive – it’s a glimpse into the future of travel and urban living, shaped by AI.

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