[bijant]

No! No one in their right mind would even consider using them for guidance and if they are used for OCR (not too my knowledge but could make sense in certain scenarios) then their output would be treated the way you'd treat any untrusted string.

[godelski]

You are confidently wrong

  > Powered by Gemini, a multimodal large language model developed by Google, EMMA employs a unified, end-to-end trained model to generate future trajectories for autonomous vehicles directly from sensor data. Trained and fine-tuned specifically for autonomous driving, EMMA leverages Gemini’s extensive world knowledge to better understand complex scenarios on the road. 

https://waymo.com/blog/2024/10/introducing-emma/

[written-beyond]

You were confidently wrong for judging them to be confidently wrong

> While EMMA shows great promise, we recognize several of its challenges. EMMA's current limitations in processing long-term video sequences restricts its ability to reason about real-time driving scenarios — long-term memory would be crucial in enabling EMMA to anticipate and respond in complex evolving situations...

They're still in the process of researching it, noting in that post implies VLM are actively being used by those companies for anything in production.

[nostrademons]

This strikes me as a skunworks project to investigate a technology that could be used for autonomous vehicles someday, as well as score some points with Sundar and the Alphabet board who've decreed the company is all-in on Gemini.

Production Waymos use a mix of machine-learning and computer vision (particularly on the perception side) and conventional algorithmic planning. They're not E2E machine-learning at all, they use it as a tool when appropriate. I know because I have a number of friends that have gone to work for Waymo, and some that did compiler/build infrastructure for the cars, and I've browsed through their internal Alphabet job postings as well.

[fsckboy]

>to generate future trajectories for autonomous vehicles directly from sensor data

we will not have achieved true AGI till we start seeing bumper stickers (especially Saturday mornings) that say "This Waymo Brakes for Yard Sales"