This AI entrepreneur is developing agents that can plan ahead for the unexpected

Danijar Hafner’s office in San Francisco’s SoMa district sits mostly empty. His brand-new startup is still in stealth mode and doesn’t even have its name on the door. On the day I visit, there’s only one other person there, and little in the way of furniture.

But what it lacks in decor, it makes up for in robots. Humanoids of various shapes and sizes hang like marionettes from racks that run down the center of the wide-open space. While Hafner, 31, won’t say too much about his new venture just yet, he describes it as a continuation of his longtime work to enable AI to navigate environments it has not encountered in training.

The humanoids, which he imports from China, are the next evolution of this work—and its physical embodiment. Their ability to react in previously untested scenarios will be key to getting robots into human spaces. Because if you want to send a robot into a person’s home, for example, it needs to be able to handle a floor plan and furniture it’s never seen before.

To achieve this, Hafner relies on something called model-based reinforcement learning. He develops world models—AI models designed to emulate physical reality—and trains agents within them. The agent essentially treats the model as a real-world simulation and learns how to act there.

It then uses those experiences to make predictions (to dream or imagine, Hafner might say) about future outcomes. That allows agents—or the robots they’re embedded in—to navigate unfamiliar situations IRL. Hafner grew up in a rural town in northeastern Germany, where his parents were both classical musicians.

He learned programming from a neighbor, and in high school he began taking online courses about AI, which quickly developed into a passion. AI offered him a way to emulate it on a computer. In 2015, as a second-year under­graduate studying engineering at Hasso Plattner Institute in Potsdam, he won a role as a student researcher at Google Brain.