Brief Bio

Pieter Abbeel is Professor in Artificial Intelligence and Robotics at UC Berkeley and an Amazon Scholar. Abbeel has co-founded two companies: Gradescope (AI to help instructors with grading homework and exams) and Covariant (robotics foundation models for automation in warehouses and factories). Abbeel's students have co-founded over a dozen AI companies, including OpenAI (John Schulman), Perplexity (Aravind Srinivas), Skild (Deepak Pathak), Physical Intelligence (Chelsea Finn and Sergey Levine), Reflection (Misha Laskin), Evolutionary Scale (Roshan Rao), Ideogram (Jonathan Ho), Genmo (Ajay Jain). Abbeel's pioneering AI contributions with his students include Diffusion Models, Large World Model, UniSim, TRPO, SAC, Ring Attention, MAML, Hindsight Experience Replay, Domain Randomization, Decision Transformer, LLM as Zero-Shot Planners for Robotics, RFM-1. Abbeel's awards and honors include the PECASE, NSF-CAREER, ONR-YIP, Darpa-YFA, TR35, IEEE Fellow, ACM Prize in Computing. His work is frequently featured in the press, including the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, BBC, Rolling Stone, Wired, Tech Review, and De Tijd. Current research interests are in Generative AI, Reinforcement Learning, Humanoid Robotics.

Current main research thrusts: robotics and machine learning with particular focus on deep reinforcement learning, deep imitation learning, deep unsupervised learning, meta-learning, learning-to-learn, and AI safety.

Some picture options: 1 2 3

Informal background story interview with my undergrad school KU Leuven: here

Awards List: