Amazon has hired the founders and key employees of Adept AI, a startup known for building AI agents that automate tasks for companies, a move that significantly strengthens Amazon’s AI capabilities, which have been lackluster compared to rivals.
Adept co-founder and CEO David Luan is leaving the company to lead Amazon’s “AGI Autonomy” team. He will report to Rohit Prasad, Amazon’s head of artificial general intelligence (AGI). Luan brings with him Adept co-founders Augustus Odena, Maxwell Nye, Erich Elsen, Kelsey Szot, and several other Adept staff members.
Below is a copy of the internal memo shared with the team.
Hello everyone, We’re always looking to recruit great talent to further our mission and are excited to share some updates with our team.
We welcome Adept founder and former CEO David Luan, co-founders Augustus Odena, Maxwell Nye, Erich Elsen, Kelsey Szot, and several other talented team members to the AGI team. David and his team’s expertise in training cutting-edge multimodal foundational models and building real-world digital agents aligns with our vision to delight consumer and enterprise customers with practical AI solutions. Amazon has also licensed Adept’s agent technology, a family of cutting-edge multimodal models, and several datasets, accelerating our roadmap of building digital agents that can automate software workflows.
David will report to me as the lead for the “AGI Autonomy” team, and most of our hiring team will report through David. Several employees in Product Design will report to the Devices & Services division through Mark Yoshitake.
David will also be heading the automation team, with Shiv Vitaladevuni and his team reporting to him. The automation team will continue to focus on using foundational models to automate and optimize end-to-end workflows across virtual and physical environments.
Several members of Adept’s previous team will remain with Adept and continue to operate independently with a product-focused mission.
We are excited to welcome our new team members and believe that their expertise, experience and entrepreneurial spirit will contribute greatly to our efforts towards achieving AGI. Please forward this email to your team if necessary.
Rohit
The move wasn’t sudden: The Information reported in May that Adept was pitching itself to potential buyers, including Meta. The startup, once valued at more than $1 billion, had struggled with the rising costs of training and running AI models and stiff competition from tech giants.
Amazon also received a non-exclusive license to some of Adept’s technology, including AI models and datasets, which could accelerate Amazon’s AI development, particularly in creating digital agents for workflow automation.
Adept is not going bankrupt. The company will continue to operate independently, with former engineering chief Zach Block taking over as CEO. The company said it will use its remaining technology and talent to focus on “agent-based AI solutions.”
These talent acquisitions are becoming a pattern in the AI world: Big tech companies are snapping up startup after startup and its talent, while these smaller companies often struggle to keep up. Microsoft made the same move earlier this year by raiding Inflection AI, poaching DeepMind and Inflection AI co-founder Mustafa Suleiman to become the new executive vice president and CEO of Microsoft AI. Suleiman didn’t come alone, bringing along Inflection co-founder Karen Simonyan and a team of top engineers.
Inflection AI pivots as CEO Mustafa Suleiman joins Microsoft to lead new AI division
The addition of Suleiman and the formation of the Microsoft AI team is expected to accelerate the company’s pace of innovation in consumer AI.
For startups like Inflection and Adept, the costs of developing and running advanced AI models are skyrocketing, making it difficult to compete with well-funded tech giants. Attracting this talent is as much a matter of survival for startups as it is of growth for larger companies.
But regulators are starting to smell blood: The Federal Trade Commission is keeping a close eye on these AI deals, including Amazon’s investment in Antropic and Microsoft’s cozy relationship with OpenAI.
For Amazon, the move is clearly a power play in its AI strategy. The company has been trying to show off its AI prowess across its empire, from AWS to Alexa, with mixed results. Rumors of internal turmoil have swirled as the company rushes to deliver a beefed-up Alexa this fall that will rival ChatGPT. This talent acquisition could be just what Amazon needs to jumpstart its lagging AI efforts.
