This entrepreneur is developing agents that can plan ahead
Danijar Hafner’s office in San Francisco’s SoMa district sits mostly empty, 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.
Hafner won’t say too much about his new venture just yet, but describes it as a continuation of his longtime work to enable AI to navigate environments it has not encountered in training.
Over the years, the 31-year-old has honed his approach by pitting agents trained within his world models against popular video games. More recently, he’s begun migrating his agents out of the virtual world and into physical reality.
Learn more about Hafner’s work teaching AI about our world.
—Mat Honan
Danijar Hafner is one of the artificial intelligence honorees on our 35 Innovators Under 35 list for 2026. Meet the rest of them here, or explore the full list across the biotechnology, AI, computing and robotics, and climate and energy categories.
MIT Technology Review Narrated: data from drones in Ukraine is fueling a new Wild West marketplace
Battlefields in Ukraine are littered with the remnants of drones. But behind all that wreckage, there’s a new gold mine for the defense sector: the data those drones generate.
Ukraine has begun making millions of data points gathered during tens of thousands of drone flights available to military contractors and commercial companies. It’s a quick way to attract funding and partnerships, but it turns the front line into a model training site, using the chaos of war to create conditions that AI companies struggle to reproduce.