image of a car on dark background with computer graphic visuals

The future of AI won’t happen behind a screen.

We need embodied AI. Intelligence that can safely perceive, reason, and act in the physical world.

Wayve Labs is our frontier research unit, dedicated to defining this next chapter in machine learning.

Wayve Labs

Embodied AI for the Real World

Since Wayve was founded, research has been a critical part of how we stay ahead.  Our work has spanned world models, vision-language-action models for driving, and beyond.  We’ve shown that these are not just interesting ideas – they are the keys to unlocking complex physical tasks that can transform the way we live, move, and interact.

car driving down a narrow country lane

Our Vision

Wayve was founded nearly a decade ago on the premise that AI will have its greatest impact in the real-world.

Wayve Labs was born out of this vision.  We believe that truly solving embodied AI requires creating the best possible home for scientists who want to solve one of AI’s hardest problems. A place with scalable data and compute resources, and a research team with the creativity and determination to build the foundations for the next stage of AI.

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Our Focus

Our research spans the most challenging problems in the field today, focused on solutions that scale to the unstructured complexity of the real world.

waves of compute pixels in dark background
Representation Learning

How do we learn representations that efficiently preserve the features of the multi-modal input signal that are salient for decision-making (agents, semantics, and beyond), while discarding the irrelevant clutter?

road with purple and orange lines
Spatio-Physical Intelligence

How do our models understand the spatial structure and physics of the dynamic 3D environments they operate in?

tree branch decision making graphic
Decision-Making

How can we design an architecture and the policy learning algorithms that scale with data and compute?  What role do long-term memory, language, and reasoning systems play?  What should the interface between the learning algorithm and the robot be?

Lines running through a computer style interface
Learning Systems

How can we squeeze the greatest performance from a given corpus of data, or training/inference compute budget?  In embodied AI this is critical for the proliferation of intelligence to any robot, anywhere.

lines connected in arcs
Cross-Embodiment Learning

How can we use the data and systems we built for driving to accelerate deployment to diverse robotic platforms across mobility and manipulation?

animated globe with pixel graphics
World & Reward Modeling

How do we build a generative world model that is both diverse enough for exploration and reliable enough for closed-loop planning?  How do we learn the reward model for safe and performant driving?  Can we close the loop and learn in imagination?

group of people in an office

Our Approach

We hunt for the big unlocks and the zero-to-one capabilities by empowering high-risk, high-reward research. 

Wayve Labs is an ambitious, globally diverse, high-conviction research team. We have the strategic patience and commitment to prioritise multi-year breakthroughs over incremental gains.

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Our History of Firsts

Our research team is constantly searching for things that slow us down, which has led to a rich, pioneering history of industry-firsts over the last decade.

Deep Learning
Learning to drive like a human – person testing a Wayve branded smart car
Deep Learning
Learning to Drive in a Day

We were the first to put deep reinforcement learning on an autonomous vehicle. In less than 20 minutes, we were able to teach a car to follow a lane from scratch.

World Models
orange car from above on a light grey road
World Models
Dreaming About Driving

We were the first to integrate a world model directly into a driving system. It took another five years for this work to have broader product impact.

Simulation
Example of Wayve's simulation training showing virtual vehicles in an urban setting
Simulation
Simulation Training, Real Driving

Our autonomous car drove on real UK roads by learning to drive solely in simulation, making us the first to test a model trained only in simulation in the real world.

GAIA
tiled image of car driving scenarios with GAIA text written on top
GAIA
Generative World Model

We were the first to build a generative AI foundation model built for driving, releasing GAIA to the world back in 2023.

LINGO
LINGO
Vision-Language-Action

We introduced LINGO, the first vision-language-action driving model to enhance how we interpret, explain and train our foundation driving models.

Our Breakthroughs

Publications

26 Mar 2025
GAIA-2: A Controllable Multi-View Generative World Model for Autonomous Driving
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12 Mar 2025
SimLingo: Vision-Only Closed-Loop Autonomous Driving with Language-Action Alignment
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14 Jun 2024
CarLLaVA: Vision language models for camera-only closed-loop driving
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21 Dec 2023
LingoQA: Video Question Answering for Autonomous Driving
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13 Oct 2023
Driving with LLMs: Fusing Object-Level Vector Modality for Explainable Autonomous Driving
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29 Sep 2023
GAIA-1: A Generative World Model for Autonomous Driving
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03 Nov 2022
Model-Based Imitation Learning for Urban Driving
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18 Oct 2021
FIERY: Future Instance Prediction in Bird’s-Eye View from Surround Monocular Cameras
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12 Aug 2021
Reimagining an autonomous vehicle
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07 May 2021
Video Class Agnostic Segmentation with Contrastive Learning for Autonomous Driving
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20 Apr 2021
Video Class Agnostic Segmentation Benchmark for Autonomous Driving
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17 Jul 2020
Probabilistic Future Prediction for Video Scene Understanding
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19 Dec 2019
Learning a Spatio-Temporal Embedding for Video Instance Segmentation
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05 Dec 2019
Urban Driving with Conditional Imitation Learning
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10 Dec 2018
Learning to Drive from Simulation without Real World Labels
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20 Nov 2018
Orthographic Feature Transform for Monocular 3D Object Detection
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11 Sep 2018
Learning to Drive in a Day
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Join Wayve Labs

Building the future of Embodied AI

Wayve was built on a contrarian, end-to-end AI approach to autonomous driving; Wayve Labs extends that mindset to the frontier of embodied AI, and we’re hiring. We’re looking for scientists and researchers who want to work on unsolved, high-impact problems, build systems that interact with and learn from the real world, and take ownership of bold ideas and see them through to real-world outcomes.

Explore open roles
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