Dmitri Dolgov
Co-CEO of Waymo and a founding member of Google's self-driving car project, which he joined in 2009.
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Beliefs
Korrents What they believe 22 beliefs — each backed by an exact quote.
Each is a — compiled by korrents.com, not by them: the one-line wordings are korrents', the quotes are theirs.
Recent
The best moments in physical AI will look like nothing happened at all.
That the best AI moments will look like nothing happened. It's just the task got done safely and smoothly.
Waymo Co-CEO Dmitri Dolgov: The Demo Is Only 1% Of The Work Said 3 Aug 2026
"Move fast and break things" is the wrong mantra when you are dealing with atoms; the job is to move fast and ship safely.
in Silicon Valley, there's a common mantra to move fast and break things. However, when you're dealing with atoms instead of bits, breaking things is not really okay. So, the thing you have to do is to move fast and ship safely.
Waymo Co-CEO Dmitri Dolgov: The Demo Is Only 1% Of The Work Said 3 Aug 2026
In the physical world a model's mistake is measured in human lives rather than tokens, and there is no retry button.
In the physical world, the cost of a mistake can be measured in human lives, not tokens. There's simply not an undo and a retry button.
Waymo Co-CEO Dmitri Dolgov: The Demo Is Only 1% Of The Work Said 3 Aug 2026
Show 19 more
A physical AI agent has to be safe on day one, because you cannot ship something merely good enough and let users find the edge cases.
Given the high cost of errors, you need to have a very high level of safety and a very high level of confidence on day one before you deploy your first robot, before you drive your your first autonomous mile.
Waymo Co-CEO Dmitri Dolgov: The Demo Is Only 1% Of The Work Said 3 Aug 2026
A working demo is at best one per cent of the work; the nines that follow it are where the real work is.
And a working demo is 1% at best of the work that you have to do. The many nines of performance, the many nines of reliability that follow, that's where the real work happens.
Waymo Co-CEO Dmitri Dolgov: The Demo Is Only 1% Of The Work Said 3 Aug 2026
Waymo's demo took eighteen months and the product took fifteen years — the gap between the two is the whole job.
It took us about 10 more years to begin providing a service, and then 5 more years to scale to half a million trips per week. So, the demo took 18 months, the product took about 15 years.
Waymo Co-CEO Dmitri Dolgov: The Demo Is Only 1% Of The Work Said 3 Aug 2026
Reliability lives on an exponential ladder of nines: every additional nine costs about ten times the effort of the one before.
reliability and performance lives on this exponential ladder of nines. So, getting to that first 90% or 99%, that's the easy part. But then every next nine that you want to add, that takes about 10 times more effort.
Waymo Co-CEO Dmitri Dolgov: The Demo Is Only 1% Of The Work Said 3 Aug 2026
At scale the long tail stops being an edge case and becomes the entire problem statement.
And at scale, the long tail is the problem space, is your entire problem statement. When you drive millions of miles per week, a rare event that might happen once in a million miles, that just becomes your daily reality.
Waymo Co-CEO Dmitri Dolgov: The Demo Is Only 1% Of The Work Said 3 Aug 2026
Every AI hype cycle produces spectacular demos and very few products, because each breakthrough makes the demo far easier and the tail barely easier.
And that's why every hype cycle produces a wave of absolutely spectacular demos and very few real products. And the recurring mistake of every cycle is spending on the demo when you should be saving for the nines.
Waymo Co-CEO Dmitri Dolgov: The Demo Is Only 1% Of The Work Said 3 Aug 2026
The common failure is picking the technology with the fastest early ramp and extrapolating it, when that curve plateaus below what the product needs.
common failure mode is picking the tech that gives you the fastest early ramp, riding that steep curve, feeling like you're winning, projecting that, you know, steep slope into the future and feeling like the sky is the limit, and then hitting the plateau, and discovering that the technology path that you picked actually flattens out way before the performance that is required by your product.
Waymo Co-CEO Dmitri Dolgov: The Demo Is Only 1% Of The Work Said 3 Aug 2026
Cameras alone are enough to approximately match a human driver, but weak sensing puts safety on a curve that flattens out well below superhuman.
However, if you are targeting full autonomy, and you're targeting superhuman, strongly superhuman performance, you find that weak sensing just leads to a safety curve that flattens out way too early.
Waymo Co-CEO Dmitri Dolgov: The Demo Is Only 1% Of The Work Said 3 Aug 2026
Betting a robotics company on today's component prices is betting it on a number with a short shelf life.
So, betting your company, betting your approach on today's hardware prices is just betting your company on a number that has a fairly short shelf life and is going to expire.
Waymo Co-CEO Dmitri Dolgov: The Demo Is Only 1% Of The Work Said 3 Aug 2026
Driving turns out to be much like language modelling, because a driver is holding a conversation with other road users in the body language of a car.
Turns out, the task of driving is not that dissimilar from the task of modeling language uh because of the social aspects of driving. You're kind of having a conversation with other dynamic actors in the world, but you're doing that in the space kind of body language of your agent, your car, as opposed to just the language of words.
Waymo Co-CEO Dmitri Dolgov: The Demo Is Only 1% Of The Work Said 3 Aug 2026
Structure that fights scale always loses and structure that channels scale always wins — which is the version of the bitter lesson that matters in the physical world.
Essentially, structure that fights scale will always lose. And structure that channels scale always wins.
Waymo Co-CEO Dmitri Dolgov: The Demo Is Only 1% Of The Work Said 3 Aug 2026
Plain end-to-end learning is not enough for a safety-critical agent that has to be superhuman, however fast it gets you started.
But if you need to reach superhuman levels of performance in a fully autonomous agent in a safety-critical environment, uh, just doing kind of that basic vanilla end-to-end is not enough.
Waymo Co-CEO Dmitri Dolgov: The Demo Is Only 1% Of The Work Said 3 Aug 2026
Bet on a system that is maximally learned and minimally constrained, and add structure only where it improves the scaling laws.
So, the lesson here is to bet on a system that's maximally learned and minimally constrained and leverage structure intentionally to boost performance and scaling laws both in training and in evaluation.
Waymo Co-CEO Dmitri Dolgov: The Demo Is Only 1% Of The Work Said 3 Aug 2026
Building a realistic simulator is exactly as hard as building the agent, because the simulator is itself a large AI model.
And the problem of building a good realistic simulator is just as hard as building the agent itself.
Waymo Co-CEO Dmitri Dolgov: The Demo Is Only 1% Of The Work Said 3 Aug 2026
A physical AI company needs three AIs, not one — the agent, the simulator and the critic — turning deployment into a flywheel.
So, a deployment of your agent uh in the real world generates data. That data then grounds the simulator and makes it more realistic. The simulator generates harder edge cases for the critic to score and for the agent to learn from.
Waymo Co-CEO Dmitri Dolgov: The Demo Is Only 1% Of The Work Said 3 Aug 2026
The model is table stakes; evaluation and metrics are the strategic moat, and they should be built before the technology.
that your model is really table stakes, but eval and metrics, that's your most important. That's your strategic moat. So, build your eval before you build your technology.
Waymo Co-CEO Dmitri Dolgov: The Demo Is Only 1% Of The Work Said 3 Aug 2026
If you cannot quantitatively define what good enough means, you are not building a product — you are iterating on a demo.
If you can't quantitatively define what good enough means, you're not really building a product, you're just iterating on your demo.
Waymo Co-CEO Dmitri Dolgov: The Demo Is Only 1% Of The Work Said 3 Aug 2026
Models leak and algorithms get copied, but hundreds of millions of audited autonomous miles cannot be replicated — earned trust is the real moat.
Your your models can be leaked, algorithms can be replicated, but hundreds of millions of miles of fully autonomous operations in the real world, backed by evidence-grade evaluation and publicly audited proof, that is much, much more difficult to replicate.
Waymo Co-CEO Dmitri Dolgov: The Demo Is Only 1% Of The Work Said 3 Aug 2026
In the areas where it operates, the Waymo driver is about seventeen times better than human drivers at avoiding crashes that cause serious injury.
in the areas where we operate, the Waymo driver is about 17 times better than human drivers when it comes to crashes uh that cause serious injury.
Waymo Co-CEO Dmitri Dolgov: The Demo Is Only 1% Of The Work Said 3 Aug 2026
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