A.I. Researchers Leave Elon Musk Lab to Begin Robotics Start-Up<br />You have to be able not just to tell the robot what to do, but to tell it how to learn.”<br />Mr. Abbeel and the other founders of Embodied Intelligence, including the former OpenAI researchers Peter Chen<br />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.<br />Using these methods, existing robots could learn to, for example, install car parts<br />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.<br />“We have the hardware that can do the job.”<br />Mr. Abbeel, a native of Belgium, has spent the last several years working on artificial intelligence, first as a Berkeley professor<br />and then as a researcher at OpenAI, the lab founded by Tesla chief executive Elon Musk and other big Silicon Valley names.<br />Much like Google and labs at Brown and Northeastern University, Embodied Intelligence is<br />also augmenting these methods with a wide range of other machine learning techniques.<br />Researchers at DeepMind, the London-based A. I.<br />lab owned by Google, used this method to build a machine that could play the ancient game of Go better than any human.
