Former DeepMind Researcher Launches Adaptive AI Agent Startup

Danijar Hafner, a former Google DeepMind researcher and the author of the Dreamer series of world-model algorithms, has founded a startup focused on adaptive AI agents. The company aims to apply world-model technology to physical robots. It has deployed several humanoid robots at its San Francisco office and is testing whether machines can learn control policies directly in real-world settings, avoiding the traditional sim-to-real bottleneck in simulation-based training. Hafner previously led the DayDreamer project, which showed that robots can build compact world models to imagine the results of actions and complete complex tasks autonomously without human-generated data.