Autonomous vehicles

Sep 30, 2026

AI, Infrastructure, and the Next Investment Cycle

David George, Sarah Wang, Alex Immerman, and Santiago Rodriguez from a16z walk through 25 charts from their State of Markets presentation, covering why markets are rising on earnings rather than multiple expansion, the roughly $780B hyperscaler capex race, the new age of atoms in physical infrastructure, enterprise AI adoption gaps, agent economics and falling inference costs, consumer AI and marketplace disruption, the bifurcation of SaaS, the rise of mega private companies, and the sectors they are most excited about next.

Aug 08, 2026

CAN CHINA BEAT WAYMO?

This episode discusses three critical topics in AI: the true nature of recent AI agent "breakouts," arguing they highlight governance and security flaws rather than model danger; the role of AGI narratives in fueling the current AI investment bubble and questioning its sustainability; and China's aggressive strategy in the global robotaxi market, potentially outpacing Western counterparts like Waymo.

Aug 03, 2026

Waymo Co-CEO Dmitri Dolgov: The Demo Is Only 1% Of The Work

Waymo co-CEO Dmitri Dolgov outlines seven crucial lessons from fifteen years of developing and scaling the Waymo Driver, the world's most advanced physical AI. He details the unique challenges of physical AI compared to digital, emphasizing the critical role of reliability, strategic technology choices, continuous innovation through foundation models, structure-augmented learning, high-fidelity simulation, AI flywheels, and robust evaluation frameworks to achieve superhuman safety and build trust in real-world autonomous systems.

Jul 25, 2026

Why Physical AI Is the Next Platform Shift

Encord Co-CEO Eric Landau reflects on his transition from a lucrative quant career to founding an AI startup, driven by a deep belief in AI's paradigm-shifting potential. He discusses Encord's slow, compounding path to product-market fit, the pivotal role of Physical AI, and the importance of embracing the emotional rollercoaster of startup life.

May 01, 2026

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

Dmitri Dolgov, co-CEO of Waymo, discusses the 20-year journey from the DARPA challenge to full autonomy. He explains the Waymo Foundation Model—a multimodal world action model powering the driver, simulator, and critic—and how their "end-to-end plus" architecture enables superhuman safety and exponential scaling.

Apr 27, 2026

The $15B Physical AI Company: Simulation, Autonomy OS, Neural Sim, & 1K Engineers—Applied Intuition

Qasar Younis and Peter Ludwig, founders of Applied Intuition, discuss the shift from autonomy tooling to a comprehensive physical AI platform. They explain why physical AI is more than just LLMs on wheels, highlighting the critical bottleneck of deploying models onto constrained hardware. The conversation covers their three-pillar tech stack—simulation, operating systems, and AI models—and makes the case for an 'Android for every moving machine' to solve the fragmentation in safety-critical systems like cars, trucks, and robots.