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Back to Dyna-2: General Purpose Physical Agents with Hour-Long Autonomy — Jason Ma, Dyna Robotics, with Jason Ma.

What Is a Semi-humanoid Robot?

Jason Ma describes the robot as a semi-humanoid: the upper body is like a humanoid, and the lower body is wheels. Wheels are the practicality versus performance trade-off, because legs use a lot more energy, leave the robot a lot more unstable, and make safety extremely hard to guarantee.

The upper body has a shoulder, arms, and four degrees of freedom at the waist, enough for the upper-body motion a person can do. For legged robots right now, nothing guarantees the robot stays upright and balanced the entire time. Robot dancing videos show robots that fall over very easily.

He previously built models at DeepMind and at Nvidia and saw the upper bound of a system when the builder does not control the hardware and does not get to optimize it. Robots are here to deliver a service and solve physical tasks, so solving physical tasks means being able to optimize everything.

Transcript

Dyna-2: General Purpose Physical Agents with Hour-Long Autonomy — Jason Ma, Dyna Robotics ·

Latent Space: The AI Engineer Podcast

More from this episode

  1. What Is a World-action Model?Jason Ma says a world-action model predicts the future video of the world and also turns that prediction into actions a robot can execute.
  2. Why Does Dyna 2 Use a Diffusion Transformer?Jason Ma says the Dyna 2 world action model is a diffusion transformer.
  3. How Does Dyna Robotics Generate Synthetic Robot Data?Jason Ma says his team generates synthetic robot data with frontier models that build synthetic environments and with a world action model that makes its own…
  4. Why Must a Robot Model Run on the Device?Jason Ma says a robot model has to run on the device because the robot must infer fast enough to act. A language model or a coding agent can wait.
  5. Why Does Dyna Robotics Size Robots Like People?Jason Ma says the robot's proportions are measured against real people because the team pre-trains on human data and treats the match as the transfer path…
  6. Why Does the Dyna Robot Lean Its Torso?Jason Ma gave the Dyna robot a torso that can lean because people use the waist and back for ordinary tasks, and a body that only travels up and down cannot…
  7. What Limits Hour-long Robot Jobs?Jason Ma says the bottleneck for doing an hour-long full job on any task is data and hardware.
  8. Why Did Din Tai Fung Put Robots in Many Restaurants?Jason Ma says Din Tai Fung put Dyna robots in many United States restaurants because the chain decided the robots create enough value to roll out across…
  9. How Can a Robot Work Alone for an Hour?Jason Ma says a robot can work alone for an hour when a hierarchical agent harness sits around the world-action model and strings short skills into one…
  10. Why Did People Think AI Would Never Solve Go?Jason Ma thinks people, before AlphaGo, treated Go as one of the games that AI would never solve, because the search space is larger than the total number of…

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