Waymo Unveils AI System That Simulates Rare Driving Scenarios Including Natural Disasters and Animal Encounters

Waymo launches revolutionary AI system that generates hyper-realistic driving simulations of rare scenarios like natural disasters and animal encounters, allowing engineers to test autonomous vehicles in dangerous situations impossible to replicate safely in real-world conditions.

• Waymo introduces the Waymo World Model, a generative AI system built on Google DeepMind's Genie 3 that creates hyper-realistic autonomous driving simulations using both camera and lidar data
• The model simulates extremely rare scenarios like natural disasters, animal encounters, and safety-critical events that would be nearly impossible to capture in real-world testing at scale
• Engineers can control simulations through driving inputs, scene layouts, and language prompts, while an efficient variant enables longer simulations with reduced computational requirements