Waabi, under Raquel Urtasun’s leadership, pioneers generative AI, transforming autonomous driving systems, especially for the trucking field, utilizing advanced AI simulations and dual-system interaction.
Raquel Urtasun is the Founder and CEO of Waabi. She is also a Full Professor in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Toronto and a co-founder of the Vector Institute for AI. From 2017 to 2021, she was the Chief Scientist and Head of R&D at Uber ATG. From 2015-2017, she was a Canada Research Chair in Machine Learning and Computer Vision (from which she resigned to join Uber).
Time Magazine has chosen Urtasun as one of the TIME100 Most Influential People in AI for 2023. Waabi is the culmination of Raquel’s 20-year career in AI and 10 years of experience building self-driving solutions.
Artificial intelligence has been propelling our society forward for years. Deep learning first put a spotlight on AI’s versatility and the recent generative AI explosion has shown the world what is possible when AI can understand context, apply knowledge, and communicate ideas, all learned from the wealth of information available in the digital world. This technology is transforming how we interact with computers.
Waabi is leading with generative AI to radically, change the way autonomous driving systems work. It replaces the majority of real-world testing with AI-powered simulation and has developed a foundation AI model for the virtual driver, purpose-built for the physical world. It results in a new approach in which two distinct AI systems interact, similar to the way a teacher interacts with a student who is learning how to drive.
The teacher is our AI-powered simulator – Waabi World – which leverages generative AI to automatically create digital twins of the real world from raw sensor data and then composes and modifies them to create countless scenarios and realities in which an autonomous vehicle can be trained and tested in an immersive and reactive manner.
The student is the Waabi Driver and is composed of a foundation AI model purpose-built for the physical world. In contrast to traditional processes that require manual code adjustments, Waabi’s foundation AI model can automatically learn from data – in simulation and the real world and can generalize its learnings to all the situations it might encounter on the road, including those that it has never seen before.
Watch below the video “Driving Innovation,” in which Raquel Urtasun discusses Waabi’s AI-first approach to self-driving technology and shares insights from her entrepreneurial journey. This presentation was recorded at True Blue Impact Day as part of University of Toronto Entrepreneurship Week 2023 (28 min.)