Comment by krackers
3 days ago
They can simulate "driving out of a raging fire" but not a flooded street? This seems like an admission that the fancy "world model simulation" doesn't actually mean much
https://waymo.com/blog/2026/02/the-waymo-world-model-a-new-f...
IMO there is a lot of daylight between “is not perfectly capable of simulating all situations and always used perfectly to the full capabilities of the system” and “doesn’t mean much”.
No simulation is perfect, so ideally you have a feedback look constantly looking at new real-world data as it comes in and finding where the simulation has errors, and updating the simulation to improve the correlation between the simulation and the real world over time.
My guess is they did have flooded street sims but the correlation was much lower than expected, or the details of the situation being simulated (lighting, building locations, how dirty the water is, ...) were sufficiently different from the situation that was encountered that the sim based training didn't generalize to the new context.