The System Behind Self-Driving: Waymo’s Dmitri Dolgov
From The a16z Show by Andreessen Horowitz
April 17, 2026 · 1h 4m · Episode 1081
About this episode
Dmitri Dolgov discusses the complexities of self-driving technology and the systems behind Waymo's autonomous rides.
Waymo is now delivering hundreds of thousands of fully autonomous rides each week — but getting there required more than better models. It meant building a complete system for training, evaluating, and deploying a driver in the real world. In this episode — originally aired on the Cheeky Pint podcast — Waymo Co-CEO Dmitri Dolgov joins John Collison to break down how self-driving actually works today: from sensor fusion across LiDAR, radar, and cameras, to simulation, “critic” models, and the role of AI in decision-making. They also explore why full autonomy is fundamentally different from driver-assist, what it takes to scale globally, and how recent advances in AI are reshaping the path forward.
People in this episode
Host: John Collison
Guest: Dmitri Dolgov
Topics covered
- self-driving technology
- autonomous vehicles
- AI in decision-making
- sensor fusion
- global scaling
- Waymo
Keywords
- self-driving
- Waymo
- autonomous rides
- AI
- sensor fusion
- LiDAR
- radar
- simulation
Mentioned in this episode
Organizations: Waymo, Cheeky Pint
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