Berkeley Talks

When Aravind Srinivas arrived at UC Berkeley in 2020 hoping to join Pieter Abbeel’s robotics lab, he encountered an immediate obstacle: The lab was already full.Undeterred, Srinivas proposed that he and Abeel work together for six months so he could prove himself. What followed was such a prolific stretch of research that Abbeel found himself repeatedly asking about his new student’s well-being.“Honestly, the only big advice I ever had to give Aravind was the question, ‘Did you sleep?’” Abbeel recalls. He says Srinivas replied, “I cannot afford to sleep until I’m officially in your lab.” After joining Abbeel’s lab and being persuaded to rest, Srinivas completed what Abbeel calls “a really amazing Ph.D.,” went on to work at OpenAI and later founded Perplexity, the AI company built around answering questions with source-grounded responses.In this Berkeley Talks episode, Srinivas’ determination is one of several stories Abbeel, a professor of electrical engineering and computer sciences at Berkeley, shares about