There is no reason autonomy should be an obscure, difficult technology—a high school kid who can make iPhone apps should be able to make autonomous systems, and Dana is the platform to enable that.
The speaker introduces Dana, a platform designed to dramatically lower the barrier to building autonomous systems, comparing it to how iPhone development tools enabled a wave of creativity and new applications. ✦ AI generated
Speaker 1 · a16z Podcast · 2026-07-21 · original ↗
starts at this moment · 50:12
There's no reason autonomy should be this obscure, difficult technology. Our vision for that is a high school kid that can make iPhone apps should be able to make autonomous systems. That platform for designing and developing is what we're launching. It's called Dana.
verbatim transcript · starts at 50:12
49:55the you know these little delivery robots? Like is that do you see a world where there's a billion of those running around? >> Yeah, I think so. I mean the uh the the the product that we're announcing I think it's probably come out around with this time is called Dana. So there's you can just simplify everything that applied intuition does into two buckets which is the we've been talking mostly
50:12about the models that go on the machines then this is we say onboard software or onboard AI then there's offboard AI this is the tools to design and develop these same systems the models that actually go on the machines our uh you know vision for that is and the the delivery robot is a great example is like a high school kid or a middle schooler they can make
50:34iPhone apps they should be able to autonomous systems. So why can't they just ask that's a very simple question. Why can't a >> ninth grader make a delivery robot in their in their home? Well, they don't have the the actual environment that they would first develop the scenarios in. They would define the requirements. Hey, I want this robot to go on my high school campus around these let's say
50:56four buildings. >> Uh then how okay now that you define the the requirements then you have the scenarios get made. where are all the scenarios that can that can uh that can be made by using let's say a satellite image of the high school. Uh then now you have to train the robot. So you need some data. Where do you get that data? There's maybe enough publicly available
51:16data that can actually train a fairly rudimentary robot. Okay. Now you got that data from online maybe YouTube videos couple other places. Suddenly the robot's not doing now you need to deploy it onto the actual machine. So then you deploy it onto the machine and then the robot runs into the wall. Okay. What happened there? The loop closes. That platform for designing and developing is what we're launching. It's called Dana.
51:37Uh which is the street that applied intuition is headquartered on. Uh and uh and our our our you know this comes from our tooling background. And if you look at like how tooling has changed in the digital AI world, if you look at like what Claude did to all we alo remember like you know from mix panel to you know uh gitlab github all these now everything has moved into a very
52:02different almost IDE frankly speaking we think the same thing is going to happen in the physical world and so uh that that's yeah that's what we're that's what we're building that's what we built and that's what we're launching and we already use it inhouse uh to develop our autonomy system which is you know and we're working on the most kind of scaled complex systems uh on the planet in all
- ·Autonomy is unnecessarily difficult and obscure today.
- ·Building autonomous systems should be as accessible as making iPhone apps.
- ·The barrier to entry is artificial, not inherent to the technology.
- ·Dana is a platform for designing and developing autonomous systems.
- ·It targets the same accessibility shift that iPhone SDKs enabled for apps.
- ·A high school kid with app-building skills should be able to build with Dana.