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This AI entrepreneur is developing agents that can plan ahead for the unexpected

Mat Honan· 8 septembre 2026

Danijar Hafner’s office in San Francisco’s SoMa district sits mostly empty. His brand-new startup is still in stealth mode and doesn’t even have its name on the door. On the day I visit, there’s only one other person there, and little in the way of furniture. But what it lacks in decor, it makes up…

Résumé

Danijar Hafner's background

Danijar Hafner is a 31-year-old AI entrepreneur based in San Francisco’s SoMa district.

He grew up in a rural town in northeastern Germany, where his parents were classical musicians.

Hafner developed an early interest in AI after learning programming from a neighbor and taking online courses during high school.

He studied engineering at the Hasso Plattner Institute in Potsdam, Germany.

In 2015, he joined Google Brain as a student researcher and later worked at Google DeepMind in the UK, Canada, and the US.

Hafner collaborated with AI pioneers such as Geoffrey Hinton, often called one of the godfathers of AI, and Ashish Vaswani, coauthor of the influential research paper Attention Is All You Need, which introduced the transformer technology used in modern large language models.

His former manager at Google, Timothy Lillicrap, described Hafner as exceptionally skilled, noting he is in the top half of 1% of researchers at the company.

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