A couple of weeks ago, I joined AI researcher turned co-founder and CEO of autonomous driving startup Wayve, Alex Kendall, for a test drive on a really difficult road in London. Wayve has been on my mind for a long time, and we wrote about it in EV#443 in the context of their most recent achievement — Alex’s team has created a 9-billion parameter world model called GAIA-1 to train their autonomous driving systems. Wayve uses synthetic training data, AI-generated driving situations, and prompting to enhance the driving capabilities.
I was blown away by the experience in the passenger seat. We drove on some of the toughest roads in London, and the system navigated the traffic — humans, cars, roadworks and even a police intervention — safely, smoothly, and with no human input.