Two and a half weeks ago Dyna Robotics published that their model is actually working, and now they are lifting the curtains on some of their deployments. Dyna-2 is a world-action model pre-trained on 1 million hours of first-person human video, which equates to training on about 170 years of hands. They unlocked transfer. With the same checkpoints, scored on robot data the model never saw, zero fine-tuning, their scaling curve holds. They hit a human-to-robot scaling law. Somewhere between 10k and 100k hours, the embodiment gap starts closing on its own. At a customer site neither has seen, Dyna-1 passes 46%. With Dyna-2 scaling successfully, it passes 87%, enabling Dyna to finally start scaling their deployments. Din Tai Fung, one of the highest revenue-per-location chains in the US, is rolling Dyna robots across its network, with hundreds of robots by H1 2027.

We’ve seen plenty of impressive robotics demos. But now the bar must move higher: robots must create real value in the real world — and that value must scale. For us, the real test is not whether a robot can complete a task once. It is whether customers get enough value that they want to deploy more. Robotics only matters when it solves real problems: taking repetitive, tedious, dirty, and difficult work off people’s hands while creating meaningful economic value for the businesses using it. ROI and scalability are inseparable. One successful deployment can prove customer ROI, but not a scalable product or business. If every new customer or workflow requires rebuilding the solution, the economics will never scale. You only prove that ROI can scale when the same underlying technology keeps creating value across customers, workflows, and industries — while the effort, cost, and time for each new deployment keep coming down. We think about the path very simply: Demo: “It works.” You’ve proven technical possibility. Pilot: “It works here.” You’ve proven it can work in a real environment and start creating value. Scaled deployment: “We want more.” Customers keep expanding because the ROI works, and we can keep delivering that value without rebuilding everything from scratch. Every deployment must make the next one better. A problem solved in the field should leave something reusable behind — a better model, better tooling, better infrastructure, or a more general capability. What we learn from one customer should make the next deployment easier, faster, and more reliable. This is also why research and deployment must stay tightly connected. Research expands what robots can do. Deployment tells us what actually matters, where things break, and what must be solved fundamentally — not patched case by case. You need both to build a product that can truly scale. Today, we’re sharing more of what we’ve learned across a broad range of industry partners — the successes, failures, operational challenges, and hard-earned lessons behind getting robots to create real value in production. The goal is not just to make robots work. They must create real value. That value must repeat. And it must scale.

Many Thursdays ago, I got this text: “Understand u guys r quite tied up with existing deployments, but when can we get our next batch of robots?” I read it three times. Anyone who has built something from 0 to 1 knows the feeling. For months, you’re pushing a boulder uphill. You don’t know if there’s a top. Then one day, almost quietly, you feel the boulder start rolling on its own. The question had changed from “does this work?” to “when can we get more?” We found our fit. The path there was not obvious. For a long time, the question I got most about Dyna was: are you a model company or a deployment company? What I rarely admitted was that I wasn’t entirely sure either. We knew what we were doing, but it felt like we were swimming against the tide because investors kept pushing us to pick a lane. The cleaner path was to just build the brain. It was a story with no revenue pressure, software-like scalability, better multiples, and less messiness. But the real world is brittle, and robots are not LLMs. So we kept coming back to what we were actually here to build. The answer wasn’t another breakthrough model. And it wasn’t more unscalable deployments. It was a robot people wanted. It took us a while to realize there was a third path. Frontier research makes the product possible. Deployment teaches us what the research needs to solve next. Each makes the other better. Both are necessary to build a PRODUCT people want. After all, isn’t that why we’re building robots in the first place? We are Dyna. A product company that turns frontier intelligence into real-world impact. There’s still more to come.

An hour of lab evals catches a model that doesn't work. It won't catch one that fails once every two hundred trials, or degrades over a week, or runs fine on this robot and badly on the one beside it. So the eval moved to where the work is. Every episode, every site, graded on the customer's definition of good. Over a terabyte a day, autolabelled into SOP steps, outcomes, and failure modes. Today, a new Dyna deployment goes from setup to production ROI in as little as three days. This is just scratching the surface. Also - we're hiring across deployment research:

Waymo was founded in 2009. Their demo took 18 months. Their first driverless rides opened to the public in 2020. It's easy to show a demo. What comes after are the edge cases, recovery, uptime, integrations, and the small failures that only show up once a robot has done the job every day for months. In the field. We spent the past year in that "after" with our customers, running their napkin operations day in and day out. Twelve months ago, Dyna-1 was the most reliable robot foundation model DEMO published at the time. Today the comparison with Dyna-2 is stark.

After so many demos, models, pilots, robots are still struggling to land real deployments with real customers. Until now. Today we’re excited to share that our robots have successfully crossed the ROI threshold, and Din Tai Fung, one of the highest revenue per location restaurant chain in the US, is rolling out Dyna robots across its extensive restaurant network. This brings our rollouts across hotels, logistics, data centers, and many other use cases to a fleet that reaches hundreds of robots by the first half of 2027. And we’re just getting started. It’s been a wild year, and today we’re double clicking on the battlefield stories and sharing a few learnings about scaling robot deployments. We are just scratching the surface. Read the full blog post:

I will be at #Actuate26# giving a talk on the model and infrastructure behind dyna-2. Excited to chat with everyone about scaling robot foundation models and deploying them in the real world! Please reach out if you'd like to chat!

Full episode dropping soon! Geeking out with @JasonMa2020 @tianyurobot @_anhquanpham @ChetBhateja on Dyna-2: A 1-Million-Hour Scaling Law for World-Action Models Co-hosted by @micoolcho @chris_j_paxton @DJiafei

Jason Ma reveals the first true scaling law in robotics: robots trained on 1 million hours of first-person human video predictably get better without ever seeing robot data "Yesterday we announced our new flagship robot foundation model called Dyna-2. It's very significant for the entire field for many different reasons. First of all, it's the first robot foundation model trained on at least one million hours of data. That in itself is a very challenging infrastructure challenge." "What we demonstrated is that even if the one million hours of data is entirely first-person video of humans doing manipulation tasks, we actually see scaling law for transferring to robot embodiments that the model has never seen before." "By training on more human data, we actually see predictable performance improvement on robots. That's a big deal because the biggest challenge facing robot foundation models is that we don't have enough data." "Unlike language models, there are just not enough robotics data out there, and it's very difficult to collect these robot data. Only by passively observing humans doing things can we scale this kind of data, and this is the first time we showed there is a lot of improvement that can transfer." @JasonMa2020 @DynaRobotics

Congratulations to the @DynaRobotics team. This is probably my favorite "scaling laws for robots" blog post so far. I hope that it *does not* remain my favorite, and that the community continues to raise the bar further. Next phase: robot brain companies start to expose inference endpoints or remote "ask me anything" sessions to test out their model on their robot. My favorite part of this blog post is that it provides enough detail that the result could be reproduced by an external lab (1M hours egocentric data is quite obtainable). They even evaluated on setups that any lab could buy (ABC-style bimanual YAM). Robotics is entering a scale-up era. The scale of investment is very serious, and so warrants serious rigor when companies make claims about models that only they can verify. Otherwise, we risk vaporizing billions of VC dollars underwritten by self-reported evaluations of capabilities.

Indeed, I love working with Jason and our entire research team. There was a time when people questioned us: Is this team really capable of doing impressive research? We don’t have professors. We don’t have industry celebrities. We don’t have the familiar names people immediately recognize. I was unhappy hearing that, because I knew how strong our team was. But I stayed quiet. Because I also knew that if we didn’t ship, we couldn’t prove anything. Today, I finally want to say it proudly: we have a world-class research team. Their names might not be familiar to everyone yet, but make no mistake—they are rock stars. I’ve seen firsthand their talent, creativity, rigor, and determination, and I’m incredibly proud of what this team has accomplished. In the end, it’s not about where you come from. It’s about where we’re heading together. Really big thanks to our awesome research team! @JasonMa2020 @kun_h____ @_anhquanpham @chetan_ @georgejygao @TopiwalaAnirudh @johnnywang_16 @YifeiRobotics @tianyurobot At the same time, we are still hiring more world-class researchers for all the directions!!!!!!!!! Please reach out if you want to raise this scaling law to another level!!!!!!! Applied Researcher - Deployment Intelligence & Continuous Learning: Research Engineer/ Scientist: Research Engineer/Scientist, Simulation: Research Internship:

Today we are introducing Dyna-2, a world-action model pre-trained on one million hours of human video. At this scale, for the first time, we discovered several new scaling laws: • world-action models exhibit scaling law on human data across four orders of magnitude, from 1000 to 1,000,000 hours, • this human data scaling law implied a scaling law on never seen robot data, • both data and objective matter; world modeling and scaling on video data are essential for cross-embodiment scaling transfer to emerge 🧵

The real impact on the industry: - Data quality still matters, but it is no longer the only thing that matters. True scalability only becomes possible when we can effectively make use of low-precision, imperfect data at scale. - Human video can be transferred directly to the robot embodiment during pretraining, without any retargeting. Real-robot data is no longer the single dominant source of value. In that sense, UMI is essentially an intermediate form factor. - The dynamics in video can genuinely be learned and then transferred to robots through an IDM. The key to scaling is scaling up the learning of video dynamics—not scaling up the IDM itself. - The action model is at the core of System 1, and the ability to follow language is its most important capability.

Robotics is entering its scaling law era. Dyna-2 isn’t a one-off demo. It addresses one of the biggest constraints in robot intelligence today: data. We show that as human experience scales from 1,000 to 1,000,000 hours, robot intelligence keeps improving, including on robots and tasks the model never saw during pre-training. More data. Better generalization. More capability. More use cases and deployments. And we’re already seeing capabilities emerge with scale that surprised us. Dyna-2 isn’t the only breakthrough we’ve been working on. There’s a lot more coming in the next few weeks.

to me, showing scaling laws in robot performance with human-hand data is one of the most important problems to solve in robotics. beyond the common narrative that human-hand data is the most abundant data source compared with teleop and umi-style data, there are two more reasons people often miss: - human-hand data is one of the few types of data that is forward-compatible. the promise of little to no data-to-deployment gap with teleop and umi will disappear once your end effectors change. - human-hand data collection is also the least intrusive way to gather physical data without hurting labor productivity. adding any device to human hands will only slow down dexterity and reduce precision. this cannot be emphasized enough if the goal is to reach human-level performance. DYNA2 takes a stab at this challenging but rewarding problem. huge props to Dyna team for pulling this off! if you look closely, you will also find previews of other exciting work happening at Dyna!

Super excited to share Dyna-2, the first robot foundation model trained on over 1 million hours of human data. At this scale, we saw the emergence of a cross-embodiment transfer scaling law: training on increasing amount of human data not only improves model prediction on held-out human data but also on robot data the model has never seen before 🤯 We validate that this transfer scaling law does translate to on-robot performance across 3 different robot platforms, and uncovers that both training objective and data matter greatly for this emergence. Crucially, our results position video as a new scaling axis for physical AI. Beyond these scaling-law oriented results, we also dissect Dyna-2 greatly, going in-depth on its many capabilities, including language following via world modeling, enhanced robustness and precision, zero-shot customer site deployment, and some cool video generation results! Read our technical blog post for more details! I do think this is a very important result that shows a very different path for robot foundation models from the ones we are marching on. Really excited for the road ahead. We have more releases coming, stay tuned!

The most important result in Dyna-2 is that the human data scaling law in fact implied a scaling law on never-seen robot data: scaling human data for pre-training can predictably improve zero-shot offline evaluation on robot data. In our blog, we also show that this scaling also transfers to on-robot evaluation via post-training on diverse robot embodiments.