Building a robotics company in public. Co-founder & CEO @makermodsai backed by @fdotinc https://xitter.cf/t.co/iqxjzOSRlB
San Francisco, CA
Joined May 2019
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Ryan Chan retweeted
The fastest way to try Dream-1 on your own robot arms:
playground.makermods.ai
Plug your arms into a laptop, open Chrome, type a task. Nothing to install: no Python, no ROS, no drivers
No arms yet? Buy one from makermods.ai
How it works 👇
The whole robot stack runs in a browser tab. Servo drivers, calibration, cameras, the control loop and IK are all TypeScript. The tab talks to your arms over Web Serial. Dream-1 runs in the cloud, everything that touches the robot runs in your browser.
We wrote the SO-101's Feetech STS3215 servo protocol from scratch in TypeScript, packet by packet at 1 Mbaud. Two background threads split the work. One owns the serial ports and runs a 20 Hz control loop. The other handles the cameras, the Dream-1 calls and the IK.
Setup takes a few clicks:
- Swing to find: move each arm by hand and the console watches every USB port to see which one moved. No guessing /dev/tty names.
- Auto-calibrate: motors drive each joint to its end stops, write the result to the servos' memory, and line it up with Dream's reference arm. Both arms calibrate at once.
Dream-1 outputs hand poses, not joint angles, so something has to turn them into joint commands. We ported Dream's own trajectory IK solver to TypeScript. It solves each full 48-step action chunk at once, with velocity, acceleration and jerk limits, and it's checked against the Python SDK's output.
No arm yet? The same page runs a MuJoCo physics sim in the browser, compiled to WebAssembly. Prompt Dream-1 on virtual arms first. Works with SO-101, Maker Arm and Metal Arm.
try it out yourself -> playground.makermods.ai
Ryan Chan retweeted
Introducing Junfan Labs @junfanlabs.
Physical AI doesn't wait for Saturday. Neither will I.
For 35 editions of @saturdayrobotic, I've brought researchers and founders together to explore the papers shaping robotics and world models.
Building this community has taught me how to understand the field—and where reading stops.
You can't read your way to knowing whether a robot actually works. You have to test it on real hardware, understand where it fails, and produce evidence that researchers, companies, and investors can act on.
A club reads. A lab proves.
I'm building @junfanlabs around this conviction.
Research. Real-world evaluation. Technical advisory. Industry partnerships.
One goal: close the gap between what AI systems claim to do and what they can reliably do in the physical world.
The opportunity isn't just to build better robots. It's to build better ways to understand, evaluate, and deploy them.
I'm continuing to lead @saturdayrobotic while building @junfanlabs as a platform for deeper research, real-world evaluation, and industry collaboration.
One brings the community together around frontier research. The other extends that work into new research, technical partnerships, and real-world applications.
Both are part of the same mission: advancing Physical AI beyond what looks impressive on paper or in a demo.
The next chapter starts now. 🔬
#PhysicalAI #Robotics #WorldModels #EmbodiedAI #JunfanLabs #SaturdayRobotics #JunfanZhu
Ryan Chan retweeted
Introducing Product Hunt for agents.
The leaderboard of the most popular tools agents are using today.
monid.ai/rankings
Ryan Chan retweeted
Great working together with @jerthesquare_ again in @dreamlabs_ai =))
Ryan Chan retweeted
After working on Dream-1 for the last 4 months, here's my take:
LLMs vs WAMs isn't the right framing. A model like Dream-1 will soon be a tool call for LLMs, and that gets more feasible as LLMs inevitably get faster and cheaper.
Two things we didn't put in the blog post🧵👇
Today, Dream Labs is coming out of stealth with Dream-1, a robot foundation model that controls bimanual robots it has never seen, on tasks it was never shown, in places it has never been, from $3/hour.
Dream API is live for everyone, today. 🧵
Ryan Chan retweeted
officially retiring the crash mattresses
drastically reduced our control parameters and built a much simpler flight controller
much better stability and actual controlled landings with zero broken parts
Ryan Chan retweeted
Huge shoutout to @Ryan_Resolution and the MakerMods team for launching Maker Arm — the accessible open-source 6DoF robot arm powered by RobStride QDD actuators, now running Dream-1 from Dream Labs.
This project solves a key pain point in embodied AI: expensive, hard-to-source robot hardware. We were glad to support the team to deliver reliable QDD actuators for this launch. Open, affordable hardware is how we bring zero-shot physical AI to more builders and researchers.
#RobStride #QDDActuator #MakerArm #PhysicalAI #Dream1 #actuator
Ryan Chan retweeted
Dream-1 is running live on @makermodsai metal arm. Go check them out!
Try @dreamlabs_ai's latest model, dream-1, live on @makermodsai metal arms at the @encord_team Physical AI Summit 🦾
Ryan Chan retweeted
For the last ten years I have spent every moment thinking about nothing but air. And how to make better, more personalized air accessible to homes all over the world.
And today I can finally present the next huge step in that journey.
Introducing Breethr P1, the Personal Climate System.
Launching today. And open for pre-orders right now
Reserve your P1 for $99: breethr.com
Shipping Spring 2027.
Ryan Chan retweeted
Try @dreamlabs_ai's latest model, dream-1, live on @makermodsai metal arms at the @encord_team Physical AI Summit 🦾
Ryan Chan retweeted
Today, Dream Labs is officially out of stealth! 🚀
What an incredible journey these past six months have been.
I’ve always believed in two things: scaling and generalization. That belief led us to introduce World Action Models (WAMs), which learn from videos of the world and use that understanding to act. With enough scale, the right architecture, and the right data, I believe we can build a general-purpose robot brain that works across different robots, tasks, and environments.
Yet despite incredible progress in robotics, most breakthroughs have remained in research labs, out of reach for the broader public.
Six months ago, @jang_yoel , @scott_e_reed , @youliangtan , and I co-founded Dream Labs with a simple dream: What if anyone could give their robot a general-purpose brain, just through an API call?
Today, we’re taking that first step. Dream-1 is now live for everyone
Dream-1 controls bimanual robots with parallel grippers it has never seen before, zero-shot, on unseen tasks in unseen environments. But what excites me most isn’t just what Dream-1 can do today. It’s what we might discover together.
With our public robot brain API, we want to put general-purpose robot intelligence into everyone’s hands. Try it on new robots, tasks, and environments we’ve never imagined. We want to empower everyone to discover their own “wow” moments with robots and explore what’s truly possible.
ChatGPT wasn’t perfect when it first launched, but it opened up AI to the world. I hope today marks a similar beginning for robotics.
Dream-1 is still a research beta. It will make mistakes, and there’s a long way to go. But someone has to take the first step.
None of this would have been possible without our amazing team. I’m incredibly proud of what we’ve accomplished in just six months and grateful to be building alongside such talented people. ❤️
And we’re just getting started. If you share our dream, come build the future of robotics with us! 🚀
Everyday capabilities for everyday robots @dreamlabs_ai
Today, Dream Labs is coming out of stealth with Dream-1, a robot foundation model that controls bimanual robots it has never seen, on tasks it was never shown, in places it has never been, from $3/hour.
Dream API is live for everyone, today. 🧵
Ryan Chan retweeted
I still remember watching the early RTX "api": one model controlling different robots, in different labs. It felt like a glimpse of what robotics could become. Even three years later, getting a robot foundation model to work well on your own robot still often means collecting data and fine-tuning. Generalizing across tasks and robots remains one of the hardest problems in robot learning. 🤖🤖
Six months ago, @jang_yoel , @scott_e_reed , @GeYunhao , and I co-founded Dream Labs to work on that problem. Today, we’re coming out of stealth with Dream-1 and a public API.
The idea is simple: you should be able to try a model on your robot with an API call. Dream-1 controls bimanual robots with parallel grippers, performing tasks it wasn’t trained on.
It’s a research beta. It makes mistakes, and things will break. But you can try it today, see where it works, and tell us where it falls short.
This might be a ChatGPT 3 moment for robotics, when people can discover for themselves what these models can do. Opening Dream-1 to people beyond a handful of robotics labs is our step in that direction.
We’re now a team of 12. I’m proud of the people we’ve brought together and what we’ve built in six months.
Robotics within reach. @dreamlabs_ai ☁️
Today, Dream Labs is coming out of stealth with Dream-1, a robot foundation model that controls bimanual robots it has never seen, on tasks it was never shown, in places it has never been, from $3/hour.
Dream API is live for everyone, today. 🧵
Ryan Chan retweeted
Dream Labs CEO @jang_yoel reveals how Dream-1 can control robots 16-40x cheaper than LLMs from the biggest AI labs:
"It’s been five hours. Users from 22 different countries already signed up. They already made 70,000 inference calls to our model."
"Dream-1 controls robots that are unseen for unseen tasks, and it’s very cheap. We did a comparison, and there’s other models that can control robots, including LLMs from the big labs, but we’re 16 to 40 times cheaper. We need a robot native robot foundation model."
"We’ll go to mobile manipulation. Right now the robots can’t move around, but they’ll soon move around. Then dexterous hands once the hardware gets cheaper."
@dreamlabs_ai
Today, Dream Labs is coming out of stealth with Dream-1, a robot foundation model that controls bimanual robots it has never seen, on tasks it was never shown, in places it has never been, from $3/hour.
Dream API is live for everyone, today. 🧵
Ryan Chan retweeted
Our API is live! 🚀 You don’t want to miss this.
Building this alongside such an amazing team has been an incredibly rewarding experience. Couldn’t have done it without everyone who made this happen. So proud of what we’ve built together!
And this is only the beginning. 👀
Today, Dream Labs is coming out of stealth with Dream-1, a robot foundation model that controls bimanual robots it has never seen, on tasks it was never shown, in places it has never been, from $3/hour.
Dream API is live for everyone, today. 🧵
Ryan Chan retweeted
On the same mission to make robotics accessible 🤝
Working with robots has always been harder than it should be.
The intelligence was hard to access. The hardware was hard to afford.
Today, both change.
@makermodsai Maker Arm + Metal Arm, powered by @dreamlabs_ai 's Dream-1. Give your robot a task in plain language, right from your browser.
Try it: playground.makermods.ai
Ryan Chan retweeted
Going to test this underwater
Today, Dream Labs is coming out of stealth with Dream-1, a robot foundation model that controls bimanual robots it has never seen, on tasks it was never shown, in places it has never been, from $3/hour.
Dream API is live for everyone, today. 🧵
Ryan Chan retweeted
Dream-1 with the Maker and Metal Arm
This is the best combo to try out zero shot tasks!
Working with robots has always been harder than it should be.
The intelligence was hard to access. The hardware was hard to afford.
Today, both change.
@makermodsai Maker Arm + Metal Arm, powered by @dreamlabs_ai 's Dream-1. Give your robot a task in plain language, right from your browser.
Try it: playground.makermods.ai
Ryan Chan retweeted
A year ago I started World Intelligence because I believed robotics was bottlenecked by data - and that the richest source of that data is human hands doing real work.
The deeper I went, the more it became clear this layer doesn't belong on the side. It belongs inside the loop, next to the model it's feeding. I've been lucky to know the team that was already building exactly that from early on.
Early October, I joined Dreamlabs as a founding engineer, and World Intelligence has become part of the bigger picture of what we're building here: a general-purpose model for robots.
Today, we’re coming out of stealth with Dream-1 and we’re just getting started! Try out our public API today: platform.dreamlabs.ai/
Today, Dream Labs is coming out of stealth with Dream-1, a robot foundation model that controls bimanual robots it has never seen, on tasks it was never shown, in places it has never been, from $3/hour.
Dream API is live for everyone, today. 🧵
Ryan Chan retweeted
The barrier to entry in physical AI just dropped significantly.
Combining affordable hardware with natural language control straight from a browser is exactly how we scale robotics beyond the lab.
Working with robots has always been harder than it should be.
The intelligence was hard to access. The hardware was hard to afford.
Today, both change.
@makermodsai Maker Arm + Metal Arm, powered by @dreamlabs_ai 's Dream-1. Give your robot a task in plain language, right from your browser.
Try it: playground.makermods.ai
Ryan Chan retweeted
Dream-1 by @dreamlabs_ai is the first model to complete "Stand Up Bottles", a difficult robotics task that frontier LLMs struggle with.