Simulation

Agents are Robots Too: What Self-Driving Taught Me About Building Agents — Jesse Hu, Abundant

Agents are Robots Too: What Self-Driving Taught Me About Building Agents — Jesse Hu, Abundant

Drawing surprising parallels between AI agents and robotics, this talk argues that the agent development community is repeating a key mistake from the self-driving industry: underestimating the difficulty of action and over-focusing on reasoning. It covers essential robotics concepts like DAgger, MDPs, simulation, and the critical importance of a robust offline infrastructure, explaining why perfect reasoning doesn't guarantee successful execution in the real world.

Waymo: The future of autonomous driving with Vincent Vanhoucke

Waymo: The future of autonomous driving with Vincent Vanhoucke

Waymo Distinguished Engineer Vincent Vanhoucke discusses the core challenges of autonomous driving, explaining how Waymo fuses data from cameras, LiDAR, and radar to build a robust perception system. He delves into the "closed-loop" problem, the critical role of generative AI and simulation in training and validation, and how modern multimodal models are used in a teacher-student framework to distill vast world knowledge into the vehicle's onboard system, aiming for a safety standard that surpasses human performance.

Genie 3: An infinite world model with Shlomi Fruchter and Jack Parker-Holder

Genie 3: An infinite world model with Shlomi Fruchter and Jack Parker-Holder

Professor Hannah Fry speaks with Jack Parker-Holder and Shlomi Fruchter about Genie 3, a general-purpose world model that generates diverse, interactive environments from prompts. The discussion covers its auto-regressive nature, which enables the creation of consistent, explorable worlds, its key differences from video models like Veo, and its foundational role in training AI agents and advancing toward AGI.

DeepMind's Secret AI Project That Will Change Everything [EXCLUSIVE]

DeepMind's Secret AI Project That Will Change Everything [EXCLUSIVE]

Google DeepMind's Genie 3 is a new generative interactive environment that creates photorealistic, controllable 3D worlds from text prompts in real-time. This summary explores its architecture, the concept of emergent consistency, and its primary application as a powerful simulator for training embodied AI agents.

From Self-driving to Autonomous Voice Agents — Brooke Hopkins, Coval

From Self-driving to Autonomous Voice Agents — Brooke Hopkins, Coval

Brooke Hopkins, founder of Coval, discusses how evaluation methodologies from the autonomous vehicle industry, particularly from her experience at Waymo, can be adapted to build reliable, scalable, and trustworthy voice and conversational AI systems.

Waymo's EMMA: Teaching Cars to Think - Jyh Jing Hwang, Waymo

Waymo's EMMA: Teaching Cars to Think - Jyh Jing Hwang, Waymo

An exploration of Waymo's research into EMMA, an End-to-End Multimodal Model for Autonomous Driving. This summary details how foundation models like Gemini are being adapted to create a single, generalizable system that processes raw sensor data directly into driving decisions, aiming to solve the long-tail problem and improve scalability. It also covers the use of generative AI for advanced sensor simulation and model evaluation.