vertical-integration
2 items · chronological order
From Models to Mobility: Waymo Architecture at Scale — Dolgov on the Teacher/Simulator/Critic Triad and the End-to-End Debate Resolution
Waymo's architecture resolves the end-to-end debate: Dolgov states pure pixels-to-trajectories drives "pretty darn well" in the nominal case but is "orders of magnitude away" from what full autonomy requires. The 500K-rides-per-week stack is one off-board foundation model fanning into three specialized teachers (Driver, Simulator, Critic), each distilled into smaller in-car students; RLFT against the critic is the physical-AI analog to RLHF. Enterprise teams shipping pure-LLM agents without the simulator and critic scaffolding are replaying Waymo's 2017, not its 2026: evaluation infrastructure is the reliability gate, not model choice.
Apple's next chief John Ternus faces defining AI moment
Apple picking a 25-year hardware engineer to run the company is not a hedge against AI uncertainty; it is the answer. You don't put Ternus in the CEO seat unless you've already decided the AI future is won at the silicon-OS-distribution layer, not the model layer. The consensus "Apple is behind" narrative is mispricing the wrong variable: Apple is running a $12-15B capex strategy against hyperscalers spending $160B+, and the succession ratifies that as the strategy, not the problem. The real question isn't whether Apple catches up on capability; it's whether anyone can compete with 2 billion active devices once on-device AI is good enough.