Waymo wants to use Google’s Gemini to train its robotaxis

Photo illustration of an autonomous vehicle. — Cath Virginia / The Verge | Photo from Getty Images

Waymo has long touted its ties to Google’s DeepMind and its decades of AI research as a strategic advantage over its rivals in the autonomous driving space. Now, the Alphabet-owned company is taking it a step further by developing a new training model for its robotaxis built on Google’s multimodal large language model (MLLM) Gemini.

Waymo released a new research paper today that introduces an “End-to-End Multimodal Model for Autonomous Driving,” also known as EMMA. This new end-to-end training model processes sensor data to generate “future trajectories for autonomous vehicles,” helping Waymo’s driverless vehicles make decisions about where to go and how to avoid obstacles.

But more importantly, this is one of the first indications…

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