Inside the lab where Waymo is building the brains for its driverless cars

Right now, a minivan with no one behind the steering wheel is driving through a suburb of Phoenix, Arizona. And while that may seem alarming, the company that built the "brain" powering the car's autonomy wants to assure you that it's totally safe. Waymo, the self-driving unit of Alphabet, is the only company in the world to have fully driverless vehicles on public roads today. That was made possible by a sophisticated set of neural networks powered by machine learning about which very is little is known -- until now. For the first time, Waymo is lifting the curtain on what is arguably the most important (and most difficult-to-understand) piece of its technology stack. The company, which is ahead in the self-driving car race by most metrics, confidently asserts that its cars have the most advanced brains on the road today. Anyone can buy a bunch of cameras and LIDAR sensors, slap them on a car, and call it autonomous. But training a self-driving car to behave like a human driver, or, more importantly, to drive better than a human, is on the bleeding edge of artificial intelligence research.