Rohan Saphal

Sim research @waymo | @CompSciOxford @whi_rl | @iitmadras

[Shimon Whiteson @shimon8282]

I'm hiring a Research Engineer for my multi-agent learning team at DeepMind: https://t.co/Z9yMrm148s

[Jitendra MALIK @JitendraMalikCV]

I want to offer some unsolicited advice to computer vision researchers jumping into robotics. Don't focus too much on VLMs, VLAs etc. That's fine, but the real action is at the sensorimotor level. Most of the open problems in robotics are in manipulation, which is about hand-object interaction, and contacts and forces are central. Proprioception and tactile sensing are as important as vision. Don't get seduced by cherry-picked demos. You can't do robotics without doing robotics.

[kache @yacineMTB]

you can outsource your thinking
but you cannot outsource your understanding

[Balaji @balajis]

The right kind of ambition is to compete against yourself. To be the best version of yourself.

[Rohan Saphal @RohanSaphal]

@theshre @amasad @Replit @james406 @posthog @meetgranola Amazing!

[Tim Ferriss @tferriss]

"The single most important thing for anybody wanting to break into any industry is go to the headquarters or cluster of that industry. Move to wherever that thing is. And all the advice that you can do anything from anywhere and everything's remote is all BS. With AI, 91 percent of private technology market cap is in the Bay Area. Ninety-one percent of the entire global set of AI market cap is all in one 10 by 10 area."
— Elad Gil

Listen to my interview with @eladgil:

https://t.co/Z1cjLkdcX0

[Konstantine Buhler @Konstantine]

Waymo vehicles have a 13x lower rate of serious accidents than human drivers. Six generations of hardware. Thousands of innovations in AI and software. 170M+ fully autonomous miles.

For 20 years @Dmitri_Dolgov has been focused on making driving safer. While dozens of companies have come and gone, Dmitri persisted.

He knows that getting to "good" is easy, getting to "great" is hard and getting to "super human safety" is extreme. Dmitri chooses extreme.

My favorite part about him? He’s extremely humble about all this and remains focused on what's next: scaling.

We're grateful to have hosted Dmitri and his @Waymo team at @sequoia AI Ascent last week. Full video here:

00:00 Introduction
01:25 Origins
02:45 DARPA Challenge
04:18 Google Self Driving
05:44 Startup Grind
07:11 The AV Hype Cycle
09:47 Waymo World Model
12:41 End-to-End
15:28 Gen 6 Hardware and Scaling
19:53 Safety Stories and the Future

[Apoorva Govind @Appyg99]

Anthropic be like

[Rohan Saphal @RohanSaphal]

Can't wait to try this out!

[Waymo @Waymo]

London, we’re taking the next step! 🚙 We’re officially beginning autonomous driving with a trained specialist behind the wheel. We can’t wait to offer Londoners a quiet, convenient, and magical way to connect to the Tube, bus, or their final destination later this year.

[Rohan Saphal @RohanSaphal]

Really great to hear @dougli_ and his experience building @lightfern_ai yesterday at @meetgranola !

[Waymo @Waymo]

We’re moving the needle 📈 We’ve officially doubled our paid rides per week in less than a year. This is what responsible and effective scaling of autonomous technology looks like.

[reed @reed]

take @waymo and skip the creepy driver

[binji @binji_x]

all the london homies are embracing delusional optimism

imo what the uk has been missing is the “i can do it big” energy that the usa has.

[reed @reed]

waymo snow driving coming along well

[Sahil Bloom @SahilBloom]

A mentor once told me this: Life will test you with the same challenge until you learn the lesson. The same fight in every relationship. The same burnout in every job. The same regret in every missed chance. Until you do the inner work, the outer world won’t change.

[CooperBaggs 💰🍞 @edgaralandough]

My favorite quote from Atomic Habits by James Clear:

"It doesn't make sense to continue wanting something if you're not willing to do what it takes to get it.
If you don't want to live the lifestyle, then release yourself from the desire.
To crave the result but not the process is to guarantee disappointment."

[David Sinclair @davidasinclair]

Discipline is not punishment. It is loyalty to a version of yourself that does not yet exist

[David Sinclair @davidasinclair]

Comfort is seductive because it feels harmless, but it quietly compounds into weakness

[Rohan Saphal @RohanSaphal]

It's not forward deployed engineering, it's forward deployed change management engineering :P

[Rohan Saphal @RohanSaphal]

Everyday I get reminded, talent is evenly distributed, but risk capital is heavily concentrated