Meet the Chinese Startup Using AI—and a Small Army of Workers—to Train Robots

The real question is how effectively AgiBot’s algorithms can teach its robots new tricks. Using reinforcement learning to teach a robot tasks that require improvisation generally requires a lot of training data, and studies show it cannot be perfected entirely inside a simulation.

AgiBot speeds up the learning process by having a human worker guide the robot through a task, which provides a foundation for it to then learn by itself. Before cofounding AgiBot, chief scientist Jianlan Luo did cutting-edge…