Nvidia’s former senior director of robotics research, Dieter Fox, announced this month that after almost eight years with the AI chipmaker, he had joined the Allen Institute for AI non-profit research institute as a senior research director, and was building a robotics team.
Mr. Fox noted the team he was developing would be focused on foundation models for robotics, “drawing on Al2’s strengths in language, vision, and embodied reasoning.”
“After nearly eight years at NVIDIA, I’m excited to share that I’ve started a new chapter. I still vividly remember meeting Jensen Huang at CVPR 2017 in Hawaii-a conversation that helped spark what became a remarkable journey. Since then, NVIDIA Robotics has grown from a small research effort into a significant force in both industrial and humanoid robotics,” said Mr. Fox in a LinkedIn post.
He joined Nvidia in 2017, according to his profile.
Nvidia recently became the world’s first public company to secure a value of $4 trillion, amidst the Generative AI boom and an exploding demand for advanced hardware that powers the complex AI models Big Tech firms are racing to build.
Mr. Fox hailed Nvidia’s “world-class robotics research team,” which is working on areas such as object manipulation, motion generation, simulation-based training, human-robot collaboration, synthetic data generation, and generative Al for robotics.
“I’m confident the team will continue to thrive under the leadership of Yash Narang,” he added.
Mr. Fox noted that his new team at Al2 was looking for “exceptional researchers, engineers, and interns” who had experience with vision-language models, simulation and planning, and large-scale training for reasoning and control.
He is also a professor at the University of Washington and will continue to teach, per his LinkedIn account.
Robotics represents the next stage for many AI technologists who are working to see how advances in AI large language models (LLMs) could move beyond chatbots and instead be applied across various mechanical use-cases to achieve real life results.
“Developers are taking advantage of NVIDIA Robotics’ full-stack, accelerated cloud-to-edge systems, acceleration libraries, and optimized AI models to develop, train, simulate, deploy, operate, and optimize their robot systems and software like never before,” said Nvidia about its robotics-focused offerings on its website.
