Every hiker (even a weekend warrior like yours truly) knows the sickening feeling of a false summit. You sweat for hours, legs aching, lungs burning, 100% convinced that the final peak is just over the next ridge – only to climb over it and discover a near-vertical rock face stretching into what feels like the clouds themselves.
In the multi-billion-dollar race to strip the steering wheel out of modern electric cars, Alphabet’s Waymo published an engineering manifesto that delivers that exact ice-cold diagnosis to the autonomous world, and without mentioning their name – looking right at Tesla’s high-stakes gamble.
The post, authored by Waymo’s head of AI foundations Srikanth Thirumalai, lays out ten fundamental lessons (I wonder if Waymo wanted this to be seen as 10 commandments?) distilled from driving more than 200 million fully driverless miles.
