Pieter Abbeel, born in 1977, is a professor of electrical engineering and computer sciences at the University of California, Berkeley. He serves as the Director of the Berkeley Robot Learning Lab and co-director of the Berkeley AI Research (BAIR) Lab. He is also a co-founder of Covariant, a company that receives funding from investors and focuses on teaching robots new, complex skills. Additionally, he is a co-founder of Gradescope, an online grading system used by more than 500 universities in the United States. Abbeel is best known for his research in robotics and machine learning, especially in the area of deep reinforcement learning. In 2021, he became an Investment Partner at AIX Ventures, a venture capital fund that invests in artificial intelligence startups.
Early life and education
Abbeel was born in Antwerp, Belgium, in 1977. He lived in the nearby town of Brasschaat during his childhood.
As a high school student at Sint-Michielscollege in Brasschaat, Abbeel played basketball for the school’s team. Later, he joined the basketball team at KU Leuven University, where he earned a Bachelor of Science and Master of Science in electrical engineering in 2000.
Abbeel completed his Ph.D. in computer science at Stanford University. His research focused on artificial intelligence, and he became interested in AI because he believed it could help create tools for other fields and that intelligence is a key difference between humans and other species. Initially, Abbeel planned to earn a master’s degree in computer science, but he decided to continue for his Ph.D. because there were many AI projects at Stanford. He was the first Ph.D. student of Professor Andrew Ng, who was a new professor at Stanford at the time. After finishing his Ph.D. in 2008, Abbeel became an assistant professor in the electrical engineering and computer science department at the University of California, Berkeley.
Career
When Abbeel arrived at UC Berkeley as an assistant professor, he started the Berkeley Robot Learning Lab. In 2014, he helped create Gradescope with other engineers from UC Berkeley, including Arjun Singh, Sergey Karayev, and Ibrahim Awwal. Gradescope was bought by TurnItIn in 2018. In 2016, Abbeel joined OpenAI, where he wrote many articles about reinforcement learning, robot learning, and unsupervised learning. That same year, he became co-director of the Berkeley Artificial Intelligence Research (BAIR) Lab, which includes students studying machine learning and robotics at different education levels. He also started Berkeley Open Arms, which has a license for the Blue Robot project's intellectual property from UC Berkeley. In 2017, he became a full-time professor with tenure at UC Berkeley.
In October 2017, Abbeel and three of his students—Peter Chen, Rocky Duan, and Tianhao Zhang—helped start Covariant, which was previously called Embodied Intelligence. Based in Emeryville, California, Covariant launched in January 2020 and was covered by the New York Times, Wired, MIT Technology Review, and IEEE Spectrum. The company currently has $147 million in funding. Its website says the team is working on a universal AI to help robots see, think, and interact with the world using deep imitation learning and deep reinforcement learning. In addition to his research, Abbeel teaches college-level and graduate classes on Artificial Intelligence, Robotics, and Deep Unsupervised Learning. He also hosts a weekly podcast called The Robot Brains, which features experts in AI and robotics.
Abbeel joined Amazon in August 2024 when Amazon agreed to license Covariant's robotics foundation models and hire the company's founders. In December 2025, Abbeel was named head of Amazon's large language model efforts within the AGI organization, while continuing his work on robotics.