Amazon had a secret invitation-only conference, where Jeff Bezos showed up in a robotic suit

Amazon robotics conference
Business Insider

Earlier this week, Amazon held a secret, invitation-only event for the machine-learning and robotics community.

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The three-day event, at the Parker Palm Springs resort in California, had hundreds of guests from the business, entertainment, and robotics sectors.

Business Insider got photos of the event from one of the attendees. Here's what it was like:

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Plenty of food and booze ... served on a Kiva, the robots made by Kiva Systems, the company Amazon bought for $775 million. Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos was spotted drinking single malt whiskey with some of the attendees.

Amazon Robotics Conference
Business Insider

The name of the event was MARS — Machine learning, home Automation, Robotics and Space exploration. The invitation card said, "Many great humans are attending (not to mention some extraordinary robots)."

Amazon Robotics Conference
Business Insider
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There were tons of talks and demos of robots. About 130 people were invited, according to one of the attendees.

Amazon Robotics Conference
Business Insider

This one's called the NABiROS — Non-Anthropomorphic Bipedal Robotic System — built by the robotics team at UCLA. Other demos were done by the HyQ quadruped robot and the MIT Cheetah robot.

Amazon Robotics Conference
Business Insider
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And lots of presentations. Guest speakers included Intel CEO Brian Krzanich, August cofounder Yves Behar, and Toyota Research Institute CEO Michael Cyrus.

Amazon Robotics Conference
Business Insider

At one point, Bezos showed up on stage wearing a robotic suit that's supposed to make you feel old. Sort of the opposite of an Iron Man suit. The person in the blue suit is Bezos.

Amazon Robotics Conference
Business Insider
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There were also fireside chats. Dan Brown, author of "The Da Vinci Code," and Ron Howard, the film director who produced "Apollo 13" and "A Beautiful Mind," were there, too.

Amazon Robotics Conference
Business Insider

This isn't the first invitation-only event held by Amazon, according to Bloomberg. It also does an event called Campfire for authors once a year in Santa Fe, New Mexico.

Amazon Robotics Conference
Business Insider

Source: Bloomberg

Amazon Jeff Bezos
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