Amazon hires robotics startup Covariant’s founders

Amazon has hired AI robotics startup Covariant’s founders, Pieter Abbeel, Peter Chen, and Rocky Duan, along with about a quarter of the startup’s employees.  It’s also signed a non-exclusive license to use Covariant’s robotic foundation models. Covariant has developed an LLM that’s focussed on enabling robotic arms to perform common warehouse tasks like bin picking more efficiently. Covariant, meanwhile, said it will continue operating under the leadership of Ted Stinson and Tianhao Zhang.