When we released Dyna-2 at the beginning of August, one of the most common reactions was: why? So what? Fair question. People are tired of PR releases saying “we trained on XXX hours of data” while the robots still aren’t doing meaningful work in the real world or creating enough ROI for customers. We deeply understand that. Technology is ultimately just a way to make people’s lives better, and behind every technology there needs to be a clear why. The goal of Dyna-2 was never to pile up data for attention. The goal was to build a System-1 model that can understand high-level instructions and execute them end to end in the physical world. Embodied AI has been stuck on isolated tasks for a very long time. But when our BD team talks to customers, the ask is actually very consistent: give me something that requires little to no babysitting, so humans can spend their time on what humans are actually good at. If a robot can only do one isolated task at a time, humans still need to coordinate around it, move things between steps, handle exceptions, and constantly supervise it. At that point, the robot hasn’t removed babysitting. It has just changed who is babysitting whom. That completely defeats the purpose of embodied AI, and that is definitely not the world we want to build. So we trained our foundational world-action model on 1M+ hours of human video and language supervision. The point was never that “1M hours” sounds impressive. The point was to let the model understand what people want, understand how the physical world evolves, and turn an instruction into a sequence of actions that actually finishes the job. That is the why behind Dyna-2. Today, Dyna-2.1 is carried by Taku to turn that intelligence into an end-to-end physical agent that can take on complete workflows and deliver real value to customers. We want to bring this everywhere as fast as we can. The second question we hear all the time is: why build another robot? Isn’t hardware and low-level control basically solved? I hear this surprisingly often. I think a lot of the misunderstanding comes from the amazing demo videos we all see online. Robotics can look so impressive that it is easy to feel like hardware already had its “iron man moment,” the body is solved, and now all that is left is the brain. Once you actually deploy robots into the physical world, you learn very quickly that this is not true. We have enormous respect for traditional robotics because we understand how hard anything physical becomes once you care about reliability, precision, lifetime, recovery, maintainability, and cost. Not for a five-minute demo, but day after day in a real operation. Taku was carefully designed and tuned around loco-manipulation, which is still a very underdeveloped domain. A robot that needs to move through the world while manipulating it continuously has very different requirements from locomotion alone or stationary manipulation alone. There are a lot of bitter lessons here that you can only learn by getting into the details. I’m really proud that our team did exactly that and turned those lessons into a real system with the right technologies instead of assuming those problems were already solved. Finally, it’s all about people. No matter how shiny a company looks from the outside, the people inside are what we take the most pride in. The photo below is one of my favorite Dyna photos: 4:30am in the Dyna office, with such a talented and dedicated team happily crafting Taku together. What I love about this photo is not the late hour itself. It’s that the energy, diligence, and hard work come from genuine love for what we are building and pride in the craft. Nobody creates something great just by being told to work harder. The best work comes when people deeply care about the thing they are building, enjoy building it together, and want to make it better. That’s the culture I’m most proud of at Dyna. We dislike bullshit. We just cook and ship. And hopefully, piece by piece, bring humanity forward. For more technical details on Dyna-2.1 and Taku: dyna.co/dyna-2.1