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

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. 00:00 Introduction 01:25 Dmitri Origins and Education 02:45 DARPA Challenge Spark 04:18 Google Self Driving Beginnings 05:44 Startup Grind and Leadership 07:11 Surviving the AV Hype Cycle 09:47 Waymo World Model Explained 12:41 End to End Plus Structure 15:28 Gen 6 Hardware and Scaling 19:53 Safety Stories and Future Vision

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