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By: myai4.com | March 2026
"THE CAR THAT DRIVES ITSELF AND THE MEN WHO MADE IT REAL"
In 2009, a small team of engineers at Google instrumented a Toyota Prius with off-the-shelf sensors and a PC, and set out to answer a question that most of the industry considered
impossible: could a car drive itself, completely without human input, through the complex streets of a real city?
Seventeen years later, the answer is no longer a question. Waymo's autonomous vehicles complete more than 250,000 rides every week across San Francisco, Los Angeles, Phoenix, Austin, Dallas, Houston, San Antonio and Orlando, without a driver behind the wheel. It is, without exaggeration, one of the most ambitious and successful applications of artificial intelligence ever deployed in the real world.
On Thursday, August 6, 2026, the two men most responsible for that journey will share a stage at AI4 2026 for a conversation that offers something rare: the full arc of a moonshot, told by the people who lived it from the very beginning.
"SEBASTIAN THRUN: THE DREAMER WHO STARTED IT ALL"
Sebastian Thrun is an internationally recognized technologist, entrepreneur and academic leader, best known for founding Google X — now X, the Moonshot Factory — and for serving as the founding CEO of Waymo, the world's leading autonomous driving company.
Born in Solingen, Germany, Thrun studied economics, medicine and computer science before earning his PhD in computer science from the University of Bonn. His academic career took him to Carnegie Mellon and eventually to Stanford, where he became a professor and director of the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory.
It was at Stanford where everything began. In 2005, Thrun led the Stanford Racing Team -nicknamed "Stanley"- to victory in the DARPA Grand Challenge, a US government competition to build a vehicle capable of navigating 132 miles of desert terrain autonomously. Stanley not only won, it changed what the world believed was possible.
That success attracted the attention of Google, and in 2009 Thrun joined the company to found what would become the most ambitious self-driving car project in history. During his time at Google, he founded and led landmark projects including Google's self-driving car team, Street View, Ground Truth, Waymo, Google Glass, Google Brain, Google Wing and GCam.
But Thrun's impact extends far beyond autonomous vehicles. He is also the founder and former CEO of Udacity, the online education platform that has educated tens of millions of people worldwide in AI, machine learning and software development. Together with Peter Norvig, he co-created the first global MOOC, enrolling more than 160,000 students and redefining access to education at scale.
He has authored more than 400 peer-reviewed scientific publications and 12 books, reflecting decades of foundational research across robotics, artificial intelligence, and computer science.
Today, Thrun has moved on to new frontiers, but the company he founded continues to lead the world in autonomous mobility.
"DMITRI DOLGOV: THE ENGINEER WHO NEVER LEFT"
If Sebastian Thrun is the dreamer who started the journey, Dmitri Dolgov is the engineer who never stopped driving it forward.
Born in the Russian SFSR and raised in Moscow, Dolgov traveled often, living in Japan for a year and attending high school in the United States before returning to Russia. He earned his Bachelor of Science and Master of Science degrees in physics and math from the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology, followed by a PhD in computer science from the University of Michigan.
His path to Waymo began at Stanford, where he completed his postdoctoral research and joined the university's team for the DARPA Urban Challenge in 2007, the same competition that had cemented Thrun's reputation two years earlier. From Stanford, he moved to Toyota's research division, and then in 2009 joined Thrun's team at Google to help build what would become Waymo.
As co-CEO, Dolgov is responsible for overall company strategy, with his primary focus on the development and deployment of the Waymo Driver, based on a custom, in-house designed, fully autonomous technology stack.
What makes Dolgov's story remarkable is his consistency. While the autonomous vehicle industry has seen dozens of companies rise and collapse, dozens of executives come and go, and billions of dollars in failed bets, Dolgov has remained at the helm of Waymo for more than fifteen years. He was there at the very beginning, and he is there now, guiding a company that recently announced a $16 billion investment round and has achieved a 90% reduction in serious injury crashes compared to human drivers.
As Dolgov himself has described the mission: "Full autonomy is one of the most complex engineering challenges of our times; it's the software equivalent of putting a human on the moon."
"WHAT THEY WILL DISCUSS AT AI4 2026"
In this special session, Dolgov and Thrun, two of the original architects behind Waymo, will reflect on the journey from early experimentation to global deployment. Their conversation will explore the strategic decisions, technical breakthroughs, and sustained commitment required to transform autonomous driving from a research initiative into the world's leading autonomous mobility service.
This is not a conversation about the future of self-driving cars in the abstract. It is a conversation between two people who actually built the thing — one who laid the foundation and moved on to new challenges, and one who stayed to scale it to the real world.
Together, they will address the questions that matter most to anyone building AI systems today: How do you sustain a moonshot through years of setbacks and skepticism? How do you transition from research to real-world deployment at scale? What does it take to build AI that people trust with their lives?
"WHY THIS CONVERSATION MATTERS BEYOND CARS"
Waymo is not just a story about self-driving vehicles. It is the most detailed case study in existence of what it actually takes to deploy artificial intelligence in the physical world — safely, reliably, and at scale.
Every organization building AI today faces versions of the same challenges Waymo has spent seventeen years solving: the gap between what works in a lab and what works in reality, the difficulty of building public trust, the patience required to do something right rather than fast, and the organizational discipline to maintain safety standards under commercial pressure.
When Dolgov and Thrun take the stage on August 6, they will bring with them seventeen years of hard-won lessons that no textbook, research paper or conference panel can fully replicate. For anyone who wants to understand what it truly means to build AI that works in the real world — this is the session not to miss.
"PRACTICAL INFORMATIONv
The Dolgov–Thrun keynote will take place on the morning of Thursday, August 6, 2026, on the main stage at The Venetian Las Vegas, as part of AI4 2026 (August 4–6). The full agenda, including hundreds of additional sessions across all tracks, is available at ai4.io. Registration is open.
*Note: Article produced with AI assistance (Claude by Anthropic) based on verified sources including Waymo.com, Wikipedia, University of Michigan Engineering News, London Speaker Bureau, Global Speakers Bureau, LinkedIn, and ai4.io official press releases. Data should be verified before publishing.*