A.I. Researchers Leave Elon Musk Lab to Begin Robotics Start-Up
You have to be able not just to tell the robot what to do, but to tell it how to learn.”
Mr. Abbeel and the other founders of Embodied Intelligence, including the former OpenAI researchers Peter Chen
and Rocky Duan and the former Microsoft researcher Tianhao Zhang, specialize in an algorithmic method called reinforcement learning — a way for machines to learn tasks by extreme trial and error.
Using these methods, existing robots could learn to, for example, install car parts
that aren’t quite like the parts they have installed in the past, sort through a bucket of random holiday gifts as they arrive at a warehouse, or perform other tasks that machines traditionally could not.
“We have the hardware that can do the job.”
Mr. Abbeel, a native of Belgium, has spent the last several years working on artificial intelligence, first as a Berkeley professor
and then as a researcher at OpenAI, the lab founded by Tesla chief executive Elon Musk and other big Silicon Valley names.
Much like Google and labs at Brown and Northeastern University, Embodied Intelligence is
also augmenting these methods with a wide range of other machine learning techniques.
Researchers at DeepMind, the London-based A. I.
lab owned by Google, used this method to build a machine that could play the ancient game of Go better than any human.
