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Amazon announced Friday eve that it hashired Covariant ’s founders — Pieter Abbeel , Peter Chen , and Rocky Duan — along with “ about a quarter ” of the inauguration ’s employees . It ’s also sign a non - single licence to apply Covariant ’s robotic groundwork model .
Earlier this class , Chen told TechCrunchthat Covariant is building “ a large speech model , but for golem spoken communication . ” In other words , it ’s creating AI models for automaton , with an initial focus on automatic arms perform mutual storage warehouse task like bank identification number pick .
“ With some of the smartest minds , we will move on fundamental research , marrying our rich expertise to unlock newfangled fashion for AI and robots to assist our operations employees , ” sound out Joseph Quinlivan , frailty president of Amazon Fulfillment Technologies & Robotics , in a statement . “ [ Embedding ] Covariant ’s AI engineering into our survive robot fleet will make them more performant and create real - domain value for our customers . ”
The passel sound similar toAmazon ’s hiring of the beginner of AI startup Adeptback in June — another deal that give Amazon admittance to new talent and applied science without get to fully acquire an existing inauguration .
At the clock time , The Verge described this approachas a “ rearward acquihire , ” where tech giants facing antitrust scrutiny can apply hiring and licensing deals to mask their acquisitions , rather than the other way around .
Covariant , meanwhile , said it will persist in operatingunder the leadership of Ted Stinson and Tianhao Zhang , with Stinson — who ’d been the startup ’s COO — now tread into the CEO persona . The company tote up that it continue “ consecrate to delivering the Covariant Brain into production environments across a extensive set of planetary industries , including apparel , wellness and beauty , food market , and pharmaceutic . ”
