The $8.6B Self-Driving AI Backed by Nvidia and Uber | Alex Kendall, Wayve

"Every vehicle is capable of driverless operation. That's clearly the steady state of where we're going." Wayve started in a rented house in Cambridge with $1.5M, a car in the garage, and an aim to integrate end-to-end AI into driving. A decade later it's driven across 506 cities without a single HD map and is worth over $8.6 billion. In this episode, CEO Alex Kendall joins Lukas Biewald to talk about how he built the AI driver Uber, Nvidia, Mercedes, and Nissan all backed, and why putting self-driving AI into 100 million cars a year is a far bigger bet than 10,000 robotaxis. Waymo and Tesla both come up. He doesn't shy away. Connect with us here: Alex Kendall: https://www.linkedin.com/in/alexgkendall Lukas Biewald: https://linkedin.com/in/lbiewald Wayve: https://www.linkedin.com/company/wayve-technologies Weights and Biases: https://www.linkedin.com/company/wandb (00:00) Trailer (01:01) Introduction (01:42) The story of Wayve (02:44) End-to-end deep learning for autonomous vehicles (03:52) Driving zero-shot in 500+ cities (04:22) Growing up on a farm in New Zealand (05:11) Why the company is called Wayve (06:10) Building the first end-to-end prototype (07:28) First lane following with 10 interventions (09:09) Scaling beyond on-policy learning (10:37) Why London was a great training ground (11:15) The autonomous vehicle market then and now (12:46) Mass market vehicles versus expensive retrofits (14:15) Algorithm improvements versus logistics (16:15) Plugging perception into an LLM (17:07) Adding language to the driving model (18:04) Learning social cues like flashing lights (18:42) Personalization and driving styles (19:23) Waymo's impact on San Francisco (20:30) Human-like driving behavior (20:49) Why Wayve doesn't build its own cars (22:53) Stack ranking business opportunities (24:00) Target geographies for launch (25:08) The AI 500 road show results (26:44) Is this superhuman performance? (27:56) Scenarios that still challenge the model (29:20) The trolley