In episode eight of The Robot Brains Podcast, our guest is Covariant CEO and co-founder Peter Chen. Peter is one of Pieter Abbeel's closest collaborators for the past five years, with Peter having studied for his PhD in Pieter's lab in Berkley before then working together at OpenAI. Now they are co-founders of Covariant, which they started back in 2017 with Peter as the CEO. On this episode we explore the future of AI-powered robotics, looking at what happens when you teach industrial robots to "think" and "learn" from their environment.

What's in this episode?

00:00:00 - Introduction to Peter Chen
00:01:34 - The decision to leave OpenAI
00:05:15 - The gap between academic and real-world robotics
00:08:09 - Why Covariant exists
00:09:52 - The role of robotics in logistics
00:28:09 - Covariant's customers
00:40:34 - What is deep reinforcement learning?
00:44:51 - Covariant robot in action
01:01:11 - How robots can fail us
01:09:27 - Advice for other founders

Links:
Peter Chen's LinkedIn:   / peter-xi-chen-25178356  
Covariant website: https://covariant.ai/

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Host: Pieter Abbeel Executive Producers: Ricardo Reyes & Henry Tobias Jones Audio Production: Kieron Matthew Banerji. Video Production: Bo Obradovic.