Pieter Abbeel is a professor of robotics and AI at UC Berkeley, startup advisor, co-founder of Covariant.ai and this week's guest on The Automat. Covariant's (formerly Embodied Intelligence) technology gets pretty futuristic pretty quick, so stay with us. Covariant is developing a way for people to train robots using virtual reality. While this approach is new (Covariant just launched last November), as Abbeel explains, it means that some day in the not-all-that-distant-future, a Michelin-starred chef will be able to use VR to train a robot how to cook. All the nuances and technique of that chef will be captured and even better, software will record it all so you could "download" that chef to a cooking robot in your home. Abbeel was a great guest, and we covered a ton of topics including the importance of good data, advances in computer vision, and the mismatch between what people think robots are good at and what they are actually good at.