Waymo specifically claims they never do remote human piloting. The car will present a remote human operator a choice of routes to get out of a situation, and the human will pick one. Remote piloting is way too risky.
Yes, definitely. "remote operator" is a human or an LLM which is able to make high-level decisions (i.e. what to do in a novel weird situation), but doesn't directly pilot the vehicle. Generally speaking, on-board compute is fast and stupid, and remote compute or a human is slow and smart.
I don't think that cars will have SOTA level LLMs running locally for a long time, and it seems that they actually need that kind of intelligence for full autonomy. However, it might also be totally fine if the passenger makes the difficult high-level decisions through a voice interface.
All decisions are made by the Waymo vehicle itself.
The vehicle can ask human remote operators for recommendations or clarification, but the vehicle itself decides whether to use them. Most of the time, the vehicle doesn't end up needing it.
The system though provides a way to let humans create training data for edge cases.
I don't think that cars will have SOTA level LLMs running locally for a long time, and it seems that they actually need that kind of intelligence for full autonomy. However, it might also be totally fine if the passenger makes the difficult high-level decisions through a voice interface.