Waymo published a list of “10 AI lessons” from driving more than 200 million fully autonomous miles, and several of them read as a direct rebuke of Tesla’s self-driving strategy — without ever naming Tesla.

The sharpest: trying to turn a driver-assist system into full autonomy is a “false summit,” according to Waymo. That’s exactly what Tesla is attempting with Full Self-Driving.

The post, published Tuesday by Waymo’s head of AI foundations, Srikanth Thirumalai, frames all 10 lessons around safety and the company’s 200-million-mile record in fully driverless operation.

Simply improving a driver-assist system (L2) for full autonomy is a false summit. True L4 maturity can only be safely achieved by a purpose-built system, validated on closed courses and hardened by the uncompromising experience of driving without a human in the car.

Waymo’s argument is that neither billions of simulated miles nor millions of “supervised” human-present miles can replicate what a system learns once it operates with no human backup. That’s a pointed contrast with Tesla, which trains FSD on data from a fleet of customer cars whose drivers remain legally responsible for the vehicle.

Lesson 1 states plainly that cameras alone can’t deliver safe, full-scale autonomy, and that Waymo combines cameras, lidar, and radar for redundancy. Tesla runs a camera-only “Tesla Vision” stack — a bet Waymo’s co-CEO already picked apart earlier this month when he explained why camera-only self-driving falls short.

” Tesla has spent the last two years selling exactly that end-to-end approach as the core of FSD v14 and v15 .

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