Comment by joshuamerrill

6 hours ago

It’s impressive to see simulation training for floods, tornadoes, and wildfires. But it’s also kind of baffling that a city full of Waymos all seemed to fail simultaneously in San Francisco when the power went out on Dec 22.

A power outage feels like a baseline scenario—orders of magnitude more common than the disasters in this demo. If the system can’t degrade gracefully when traffic lights go dark, what exactly is all that simulation buying us?

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joshuamerrill

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GoatOfAplomb  6 hours ago

All this simulation buys a single vehicle that drives better. That failure was a fleet-wide event (overloading the remote assistance humans).

That is, both are true: this high-fidelity simulation is valuable and it won't catch all failure modes. Or in other words, it's still on Waymo for failing during the power outage, but it's not uniquely on Waymo's simulation team.