Amazon introduced Friday night that it has employed Covariant’s founders — Pieter Abbeel, Peter Chen, and Rocky Duan — together with “a few quarter” of the startup’s workers. It’s additionally signed a non-exclusive license to make use of Covariant’s robotic basis fashions.
Earlier this yr, Chen instructed TechCrunch that Covariant is constructing “a big language mannequin, however for robotic language.” In different phrases, it’s creating AI fashions for robots, with an preliminary deal with robotic arms performing frequent warehouse duties like bin choosing.
“With a few of the smartest minds, we are going to advance basic analysis, marrying our wealthy experience to unlock new methods for AI and robots to help our operations workers,” stated Joseph Quinlivan, Vice President of Amazon Achievement Applied sciences & Robotics, in a press release. “[Embedding] Covariant’s AI know-how into our current robotic fleet will make them extra performant and create actual world worth for our prospects.”
The deal sounds much like Amazon’s hiring of the founders of AI startup Adept again in June — one other deal that gave Amazon entry to new expertise and know-how with out having to totally purchase an current startup.
On the time, The Verge described this strategy as a “reverse acquihire,” the place tech giants going through antitrust scrutiny can use hiring and licensing offers to disguise their acquisitions, somewhat than the opposite manner round.
Covariant, in the meantime, stated it’ll proceed working underneath the management of Ted Stinson and Tianhao Zhang, with Stinson — who’d been the startup’s COO — now getting into the CEO function. The corporate added that it stays “devoted to delivering the Covariant Mind into manufacturing environments throughout a broad set of world industries, together with attire, well being and sweetness, grocery, and prescribed drugs.”
