Waymo says it built a better benchmark for comparing robotaxis to humans

Waymo has created a new computer model designed to more accurately answer a fundamental question: how does its autonomous driving software stack up against humans?

The Alphabet-owned robotaxi company, which developed the computer model of human driving capabilities in conjunction with TU Delft, published a research paper about it in Nature Communications on Wednesday.

Waymo said it expects the new model to be more accurate than the previous version it has used over the past several years. The new model was built using a framework called active inference — the theory that a driver is constantly imagining possible futures and taking actions to reach the safest, most predictable one.