Amazon hires the founders of AI robotics startup Covariant

Amazon announced Friday evening that it has hired Covariant’s founders — Pieter Abbeel, Peter Chen, and Rocky Duan — along with “about a quarter” of the startup’s employees. It’s also signed a non-exclusive license to use Covariant’s robotic foundation models.Earlier this year, Chen told TechCrunch that Covariant is building “a large language model, but for robot language.” In other words, it’s creating AI models for robots, with an initial focus on robotic arms performing common warehouse tasks like bin pi ...