Waymo's Dmitri Dolgov: 20 Million Rides and the Road to Full Autonomy

About this episode

Dmitri Dolgov discusses Waymo's journey to full autonomy and the importance of safety in autonomous vehicle technology.

Dmitri Dolgov, co-CEO of Waymo, joins Sequoia partner Konstantine Buhler at AI Ascent 2026 to talk about the 20-year arc from the DARPA Grand Challenge to fully autonomous service in eleven cities and counting. He explains how Waymo persisted through every AV hype cycle by treating safety as the non-negotiable foundation, why exponential scaling is finally here (10 of Waymo's 20 million autonomous rides have happened in the last seven months), and how the Waymo Foundation Model — a multimodal world action model that powers the driver, the simulator, and the critic — actually works under the hood. Also: why Waymo is now 13x safer than human drivers, and the moment a Waymo detected a pedestrian behind a city bus by reading the LiDAR returns of their feet.

People in this episode

Host: Konstantine Buhler

Guest: Dmitri Dolgov

Topics covered

• autonomous vehicles
• Waymo
• safety in technology
• AI development
• transportation innovation
• scaling technology

Keywords

• Waymo
• autonomous rides
• safety
• LiDAR
• AI Ascent
• exponential scaling
• DARPA Grand Challenge
• multimodal model

Mentioned in this episode

Organizations: Waymo, Sequoia Capital, Waymo Foundation Model

Places: eleven cities

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