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Amazon went quiet in 2012 Acquires robotics startup Kiva SystemsThe initiative dramatically improved the efficiency of e-commerce operations and launched a broader revolution in warehouse automation.
Last week, the e-commerce giant announced another potentially equally significant deal. Hire Covariant’s founderis a startup that is testing ways to leverage AI to further automate the picking and handling of a variety of physical objects.
Covariant may have found it difficult to commercialize its AI-powered industrial robots given the high costs and fierce competition. The deal, which will also see Amazon license Covariant’s models and data, could usher in a new revolution in e-commerce. Given Amazon’s massive scale and vast amounts of data, it may be difficult for competitors to match.
The deal also marks an example of a big tech company acquiring the core talent and expertise of an AI startup without buying it. Similar agreements In June, it partnered with startup Adept. In March, Microsoft Dealing with inflectionsand in August, Google Hired the founder of Character AI.
In the 2000s, Kiva developed a way to move goods around warehouses by having chunky robots lift shelves of items and carry them to human pickers, freeing workers from having to walk miles each day looking for different products. Kiva’s mobile robots are similar to those used in manufacturing, and the company uses clever algorithms to coordinate the movements of thousands of robots in the same physical space.
Amazon’s army of mobile robots has grown from about 10,000 in 2013 to 750,000 by 2023, and the company’s scale allows it to deliver millions of items faster and cheaper than any other company.
As WIRED revealed last year, Amazon has been developing new robotic systems in recent years that use machine learning to recognize, grab, and sort packed boxes, among other tasks. Again, Amazon is using its scale to its advantage, collecting training data as items move through its facilities to help improve the performance of its various algorithms. This effort has already enabled further automation of tasks previously performed by human workers in some of its fulfillment centers.
But one task remains stubbornly difficult to mechanize: physically gripping items. This requires adaptive thinking to account for friction, slippage, and other issues, and robots will inevitably be faced with unfamiliar and tricky items in Amazon’s vast inventory.
Covariant was founded in 2020 and has been working for the past few years to develop AI algorithms with more general capabilities that can handle a wider variety of items more reliably. Peter AbeerProfessor at the University of California, Berkeley Pioneering research into the application of machine learning to roboticsAmazon also recently signed a deal with Covariant, along with several of his protégés, including Covariant CEO Peter Chen and CTO Rocky Duan. All three will join Amazon this week, along with several other research scientists from the startup.
“Covariant’s model will be part of the robotics operations system across our fulfillment network,” Amazon spokesperson Alexandra Miller told WIRED. The tech giant declined to disclose financial details of the deal.
Abeer was an early employee at OpenAI, and his company is inspired by the success story of ChatGPT. In March, Covariant showed off a chat interface for robots and announced it had developed a basic model of robotic grasping. This is
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