Dyna Robotics

not many things can demonstrate production grade quality in robotics models better than an unexpected instagram reel on a sunday morning (this is not our only hotel deployment btw 👀 it was indeed the first iirc)

Growing up, my biggest dream was to become a professional soccer player performing at the highest level. I never made it to the senior pros. Life had other plans, as they say. Somehow, a random kid growing up with the ball along the Mekong river in Vietnam ended up at Penn, where I got my hands on a robot for the first time. I spent nearly all my waking hours there working on reinforcement learning and robotics research, and eventually came to Dyna as a research scientist. There's something about being a professional athlete that every kid dreams of. You wake up knowing what you want, spend an unreasonable amount of time getting better at it, and care about winning probably more than you should. It's that sense of purpose in what you do, and the feeling of chasing mastery. The other day, I pushed this one training feature that shot up our models' precision and capabilities across our office experiments and deployments all at once. A coworker dropped a Messi photo in Slack (swipe for the receipts 😭). I was smiling at my screen for a while. I think that soccer dream never really faded. I just found something else I wanted to master along the way. And at Dyna, I've found the other parts of what I loved about soccer: a locker room locked in on the same goal, and teammates who somehow make you want to run another kilometer when your legs are already completely dead. You look to your left and right, and some of the best players of this generation trust you with the ball just as much as you trust them. ​I guess robotics & AI is my sport now. In a way, even the models I train are out there competing in their own sport, where quality, throughput, and reliability across all capabilities are the goals they have to score, no matter what the real world throws at them. And ofc, the models (and Taku 🤖) are obsessed with learning and mastering all their crafts too! It's been quite an adventure working on Dyna-2, Dyna-2.1, and bringing Taku to life. Pretty damn happy I get to keep making history with this team. We've got a lot more goals to score ⚽️🦾