Danijar Hafner spent nearly a decade teaching AI systems to navigate worlds they’d never seen before. Now the 31-year-old researcher is betting his career that those same principles can make physical robots useful in unpredictable real-world environments.
Hafner, who left Google DeepMind on November 3, 2025, has set up shop in San Francisco’s SoMa district with a startup so early-stage it doesn’t even have its name on the door. What it does have: racks of humanoid robots imported from China, hanging like marionettes down the center of an otherwise empty office.
From Minecraft diamonds to physical robots
If you’ve followed AI research over the past few years, you’ve probably encountered Hafner’s work even if you didn’t know his name. His Dreamer series of AI agents represents some of the most significant advances in what researchers call “world models,” systems that let AI build internal simulations of their environment and use those simulations to plan actions.
The marquee achievement was DreamerV3, published in Nature, which became the first AI agent to autonomously learn how to mine diamonds in Minecraft. No human data. No step-by-step instructions. The system figured out the game’s complex, multi-stage crafting chain entirely on its own.
