$WAYMO · Waymo researcher presents self-supervised bootstrapping for embodied reasoning across manipulation, locomotion, and driving

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Waymo researcher presents self-supervised bootstrapping for embodied reasoning across manipulation, locomotion, and driving

2026-08-08 · 4 company · 6 thematic

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4 bull0 bear0 neu

speakers

bill

Technical background in VLMs and foundation models (worked at Siemens on time series prediction). Co-founded General Instinct to build infrastructure for running physical AI models (world action models, VLAs) fast on edge devices.

marcel

Co-host of itnig live tertulias; focuses on go-to-market strategy and AI adoption in enterprise software; expresses FOMO about speed of AI implementation in sales/marketing.

nico

Co-founder of Default (default.com), providing real-time data layer and semantic modeling for B2B companies to power AI agents. Raised Series A. Previously built inbound scheduling/routing tools for fast-growing startups. Company has logo tattoo culture.

milan ganai

PhD student with Marco Pavone and Clark Barrett at Stanford, currently working at Waymo. Presented RNB encore, a self-supervised bootstrapping framework for discovering embodiment-specific reasoning across manipulation, locomotion, and driving.

quote

“We also use our uh, improve our cycle for refining human annotations for self-driving. Um, and so there's a lot of garbage data that could be out there. And so the idea is that with um, our approach you can remove a lot of the human uh, an…”

—milan ganai

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Waymo researcher presents self-supervised bootstrapping for embodied reasoning across manipulation, locomotion, and driving

Milan demonstrates RNB encore, a variational inference framework that discovers embodiment-specific reasoning (move+gripper for manipulation, structural affordances for locomotion…