No Priors: Artificial Intelligence | Technology | Startups

Building the factories of the future with Covariant CEO Peter Chen

Jan 25, 2024

Peter Chen, co-founder and CEO of Covariant, a cutting-edge robotics startup, shares insights on revolutionizing manufacturing and logistics with adaptive AI. He discusses the journey from research to commercialization, highlighting the need for robots to effectively learn and solve real-world tasks. Peter explores key innovations like the 'put wall' for e-commerce fulfillment and Covariant's strategic expansion plans. Additionally, he hints at a transformative 'Chat-GPT moment' for AI in robotics, where precision and safety will define the future.

40:57

Episode guests

Peter Chen

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Quick takeaways

The development of adaptive AI models in robotics requires precise grounding and understanding to solve problems in the physical world.

Covariant aims to revolutionize the manufacturing and logistics industry by building intelligent robots that can adapt to diverse environments and tasks.

Deep dives

The Excitement for Robotics and AI

Peter Chen, the CEO of Covarian, discusses his passion for robotics and AI. He highlights the importance of unsupervised learning and reinforcement learning in building capable AI models. He emphasizes that robotics is a great combination of these fields, as robots need to understand and interact with the physical world. He believes that data collected from real-world interactions through robotics will be crucial in advancing AI.

Learning Grounded Multimodal Understanding from Image and Text Pairs

01:18

Intro

3min

From Research to Commercialization: The Covariant Journey

9min

Understanding the Role of Put Walls in E-Commerce Fulfillment

2min

The Evolving Role of AI in Robotics: From Routing to Grasping

2min

Covariant's Strategic Expansion and AI Challenges

14min

The Future of Robotics: Merging Real-World Data and AI

12min

Building adaptive AI models that can learn and complete tasks in the physical world requires precision but these AI robots could completely change manufacturing and logistics processes. Peter Chen, the co-founder and CEO of Covariant, leads the team that is building robots that will increase manufacturing efficiency, safety, and create warehouses of the future.

Today on No Priors, Peter joins Sarah to talk about how the Covariant team is developing multimodal models that have precise grounding and understanding so they can adapt to solve problems in the physical world. They also discuss how they plan their roadmap at Covariant, what could be next for the company, and what use case will bring us to the Chat-GPT moment for AI robots.

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Follow us on Twitter: @NoPriorsPod | @Saranormous | @EladGil | @peterxichen

Show Notes:

(0:00) Peter Chen Background

(0:58) How robotics AI will drive AI forward

(3:00) Moving from research to a commercial company

(5:46) The argument for building incrementally

(8:13) Manufacturing robotics today

(12:21) Put wall use case

(15:45) What’s next for Covariant Brain

(18:42) Covariant’s customers

(19:50) Grounding concepts in Ai

(25:47) How scaling laws apply to Covariant

(29:21) Covariant’s driving thesis

(32:54) the Chat-GPT moment for robotics

(35:12) Manufacturing center of the future

(37:02) Safety in AI robotics

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