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JM Jason Ma On Latent Space

“Today, there's a lot of robotics companies that's talking about deployments, talking about pilots. But what's really hard is not putting your robot in one location or doing a pilot. What's really hard is that the customers believe or validate that your robot creates enough value that they want to deploy your robots across many of their sites.”

Latent Space · AI Builders · October 2026

“Today, there's a lot of robotics companies that's talking about deployments, talking about pilots. But what's really hard is not putting your robot in one location or doing a pilot. What's really hard is that the customers believe or validate that your robot creates enough value that they want to deploy your robots across many of their sites.” — Jason Ma, Latent Space

Ma describing Dyna's biggest scaled customer, a restaurant chain where its robots fold thousands of napkins a day across many US locations. He draws a line between a pilot and a customer that chooses to roll the robots out across its sites.

Transcript

Latent Space
Jason Ma

You know, the best. Very thin wrappers. Yeah. We should have filmed there. Yeah, we should have just filmed there.

Speaker 2

Obi-roll will be.

Jason Ma

Yeah, but in Dentai Phone, like if you go to Denta Phone or other, you know, somewhat upscale restaurant, there's napkins on your table, right? So our robots today fold thousands of napkins for many, many different locations, many different Dentai Phone locations in the United States. So that's actually our biggest scaled customer, right? So I want to make a distinction here. Today, there's a lot of robotics companies that's talking about deployments, talking about pilots. But what's really hard is not putting your robot in one location or doing a pilot. What's really hard is that the customers believe or validate that your robot creates enough value that they want to deploy your robots across many of their sites. So that's what's happened for us with Dentai Phone, which to the best of my knowledge hasn't really happened for other companies doing similar general purpose robots. So at Dentai Phone, our robots fold thousands of napkins per day. The quality standard is extremely high, you know, because they want like, okay, the second folder seam of the napkin is only like a couple centimeters below the, I…

Speaker 2

At some level, that's why robotics are good for. Robots are good for too, right? Humans are not the most consistent. Yes. Especially in small details, whereas a robot can somewhat do it perfectly. It's interesting, that's the example you bring for general purpose robotics versus at some level, I…

Jason Ma

Yeah, I'm sure maybe you can, right? But the hard thing about manipulating deformable object, right? Like napkin, towels, everything is deformable. There's just infinitely many possible configurations. So that's really hard for a specialized robot. And what we find is that by developing a general…

Speaker 1

Is that actually the second use case?

Speaker names from our own diarization · position estimated from where the line sits in the episode

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