Instead of providing safety data, Waymo provides other data to get almost free labor

Waymo announced the 2024 Waymo Open Dataset Challenge. They provide certain data and then researchers can spend a great deal of time and effort trying to solve their specific problems. The winners get well paid some free credits on Google Cloud!

And the categories are:

• 3D Semantic Segmentation: Given one or more lidar range images and the associated camera images, produce a semantic class label for each lidar point.
• Motion Prediction: Given the past 1 second agent history on a corresponding map and the associated lidar and camera data for this time interval, predict the positions of up to 8 agents for 8 seconds into the future. Use of lidar and camera data are optional.
• Occupancy and Flow Prediction: Predict the bird’s-eye view (BEV) roadway occupancy and motion flow of all observed and occluded vehicles given observed agent tracks for the last second.
• Sim Agents: Given the agent tracks for the past 1 second on a corresponding map, and optionally the associated lidar for this time interval, simulate 32 realistic joint futures for all the agents in the scene. It’s the second year we are running the Sim Agents Challenge, but participants can now leverage our new Waymax simulator that we made available to the research community a few months ago.

So after many government agencies and safety advocates ask for data and answers relating to safety, Waymo provides a huge amount of other data. And their categories do not include any safety issues.

This is rather a big disappointment.

And with respect to them just giving out Google Cloud credits instead of paying engineers for their work, can only say “f*ck you, pay me!”

PS: In 2022 Google CEO Sundar Pichai received $226 million in compensation.