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Pieter Abbeel
Robotics and reinforcement learning researcher, now leading Amazon's frontier model research.
Pieter Abbeel is a professor at UC Berkeley known for work on teaching robots complex tasks through reinforcement learning, a training approach where a system learns by trial and reward rather than from labelled examples. He co-founded the robotics startup Covariant, which built general-purpose AI for warehouse robots.
Amazon acquired the Covariant team in 2024, and in 2026 Abbeel was reported to be leading the company’s new Frontier Model Research group, the team Amazon is betting on after winding down most of its Amazon Nova line.
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