While autonomous driving has long relied on machine learning to plan routes and detect objects, some companies and researchers are now betting that generative AI -- models that take in data of their surroundings and generate predictions -- will help bring autonomy to the next stage. Wayve, a Waabi competitor, released a comparable model last year that is trained on the video that its vehicles collect. Waabi's model works in a similar way to image or video generators like OpenAI's DALL-E and Sora. It takes point clouds of lidar data, which visualize a 3D map of the car's surroundings, and breaks them into chunks, similar to how image generators break photos into pixels. Based on its training data, Copilot4D then predicts how all points of lidar data will move.

Labor Day weekend typically spurs highway and neighborhood traffic. The AAA didn't offer travel estimates this year based on the COVID-19 pandemic, but last year 43 million Americans traveled for Memorial Day Weekend, the second-highest travel volume on record since the company began tracking holiday travel volumes in 2000. Google estimates that people use Google Maps to drive more than 700 billion miles daily in more than 220 countries and territories worldwide. The app shows the driver which the direction to travel, whether traffic along route is heavy or light, an estimated travel time, and an estimated time of arrival. It may appear simple, but the technology behind the app is quite complex because conditions such as an accident or rockslide in a canyon can change the directions in a matter of seconds.