Pieter Abbeel — Robotics, Startups, and Robotics Startups
Pieter is the Chief Scientist and Co-founder at Covariant, where his team is building universal AI for robotic manipulation. Pieter also hosts The Robot Brains Podcast, in which he explores how far humanity has come in its mission to create conscious computers, mindful machines, and rational robots.
Lukas and Pieter explore the state of affairs of robotics in 2021, the challenges of achieving consistency and reliability, and what it'll take to make robotics more ubiquitous. Pieter also shares some perspective on entrepreneurship, from how he knew it was time to commercialize Gradescope to what he looks for in co-founders to why he started Covariant.
Show notes: http://wandb.me/gd-pieter-abbeel
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Connect with Pieter:
📍 Twitter: https://twitter.com/pabbeel
📍 Website: https://people.eecs.berkeley.edu/~pabbeel/
📍 The Robot Brains Podcast: https://www.therobotbrains.ai/
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Timestamps:
0:00 Intro
1:15 The challenges of robotics
8:10 Progress in robotics
13:34 Imitation learning and reinforcement learning
21:37 Simulated data, real data, and reliability
27:53 The increasing capabilities of robotics
36:23 Entrepreneurship and co-founding Gradescope
44:35 The story behind Covariant
47:50 Pieter's communication tips
52:13 What Pieter's currently excited about
55:08 Focusing on good UI and high reliability
57:01 Outro
503: Deep Reinforcement Learning for Robotics
Pieter Abbeel joins us to discuss his work as an academic and entrepreneur in the field of AI robotics and what the future of the industry holds.
In this episode you will learn:
How does Pieter do it all? [5:45]
Pieter’s exciting areas of research [12:30]
Research application at Covariant [32:27]
Getting into AI robotics [42:18]
Traits of good AI robotics apprentices [49:38]
Valuable skills [56:40]
What Pieter hopes to look back on [1:04:30]
LinkedIn Q&A [1:06:51]
Additional materials: www.superdatascience.com/503
Reinforcement Learning for Industrial AI with Pieter Abbeel - #476
Today we’re joined by Pieter Abbeel, a Professor at UC Berkeley, co-Director of the Berkeley AI Research Lab (BAIR), as well as Co-founder and Chief Scientist at Covariant.
In our conversation with Pieter, we cover a ton of ground, starting with the specific goals and tasks of his work at Covariant, the shift in needs for industrial AI application and robots, if his experience solving real-world problems has changed his opinion on end to end deep learning, and the scope for the three problem domains of the models he’s building.
We also explore his recent work at the intersection of unsupervised and reinforcement learning, goal-directed RL, his recent paper “Pretrained Transformers as Universal Computation Engines” and where that research thread is headed, and of course, his new podcast Robot Brains, which you can find on all streaming platforms today!
The complete show notes for this episode can be found at twimlai.com/go/476.
Episode 13 - Pieter Abbeel
Thinking robots: that's how much of the world envisions artificial intelligence and if there is one person on the planet who understands the limitations and promise of intelligence in robots, it's Pieter Abbeel, one of the world's foremost experts on robotic learning systems. In this episode, Pieter talks about robot memories and the prospect of robots with personalities eventually assisting in the home. Listen and learn about your future.
UC Berkeley’s Pieter Abbeel on How Deep Learning Will Help Robots Learn - Ep. 82
Robots can do amazing things. Compare even the most advanced robots to a three-year old, however, and they can come up short. UC Berkeley Professor Pieter Abbeel has pioneered the idea that deep learning could be the key to bridging that gap: creating robots that can learn how move through the world more fluidly and naturally. We caught up with Abbeel, who is director of the Berkeley Robot Learning Lab and cofounder of Covariant AI, a Bay Area company developing AI software that makes it easy to teach robots new and complex skills, at GTC 2019.
Pieter Abbeel: Deep Reinforcement Learning
Pieter Abbeel is a professor at UC Berkeley, director of the Berkeley Robot Learning Lab, and is one of the top researchers in the world working on how to make robots understand and interact with the world around them, especially through imitation and deep reinforcement learning. Video version is available on YouTube. If you would like to get more information about this podcast go to https://lexfridman.com/ai or connect with @lexfridman on Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, or YouTube where you can watch the video versions of these conversations.
Reinforcement Learning Deep Dive with Pieter Abbeel - TWiML Talk #28
This week our guest is Pieter Abbeel, Assistant Professor at UC Berkeley, Research Scientist at OpenAI, and Cofounder of Gradescope. Pieter has an extensive background in AI research, going way back to his days as Andrew Ng’s first PhD student at Stanford. His research today is focused on deep learning for robotics. During this conversation, Pieter and I really dig into reinforcement learning, a technique for allowing robots (or AIs) to learn through their own trial and error. Nerd alert!! This conversation explores cutting edge research with one of the leading researchers in the field and, as a result, it gets pretty technical at times. I try to uplevel it when I can keep up myself, so hang in there. I promise that you’ll learn a ton if you keep with it. The notes for this show can be found at twimlai.com/talk/28