As the company developed this technology, further funding was required, so Abbeel decided he would ask the biggest names in AI. Yann LeCun visited the lab in Berkeley and agreed to invest after pouring a few dozen empty plastic bottles into a bin and watching the arm pick them without a hitch. Yoshua Bengio declined to invest. Though he had taken only part-time gigs with the big tech companies, he said that he had more money than he could ever spend and that he preferred to focus on his own research. But Geoff Hinton invested. He believed in Abbeel. “He is good,” Hinton says. “And that’s very
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