Amazon Hires Top Executives From AI Startup Adept for AGI Team

29/06/2024

A box moves along a conveyor belt at an Amazon fulfilment centre in Sydney, Australia, on Tuesday, July 5, 2022. Amazon.com Inc. became the third US tech giant to be subject to Germany's tough new antitrust rules targeting the dominance of a handful of powerful digital firms, and will also face a separate probe in the UK.

(Bloomberg) -- Amazon.com Inc. hired top executives and other employees from startup Adept AI Labs Inc., a move by the e-commerce and cloud-computing giant to bolster the development of artificial general intelligence, an advanced version of AI that can think like a human.

David Luan, Adept’s co-founder and former chief executive officer, will join Amazon’s AGI autonomy team, led by Rohit Prasad, according to an internal memo Amazon provided to Bloomberg. Four other co-founders and an unspecified number of other team members will also join Prasad’s group.

Amazon will license Adept’s technology developing agents, or AI tools that can perform tasks autonomously, to help Amazon build products that can automate software work flows, according to the memo. Representatives for both companies declined to disclose financial terms, and Amazon declined to say how many Adept workers the company hired.

Adept raised $350 million at a valuation of at least $1 billion in March of last year from investors including General Catalyst and Spark Capital, Forbes previously reported. In a blog post Friday announcing the deal, Adept said its plan to focus on building both foundational AI models and a tool for businesses “would’ve required spending significant attention on fundraising for our foundation models, rather than bringing to life our agent vision.”

With the staff that remains, Adept will continue to operate separately with a more product-focused mission, according to Prasad’s memo to Amazon staff.

“David and his team’s expertise in training state-of-the-art multimodal foundational models and building real-world digital agents aligns with our vision to delight consumer and enterprise customers with practical AI solutions.” wrote Prasad in the note to staff. Luan will report to Prasad as the leader of the AGI autonomy team and the automations team, according to the memo.

Amazon’s range of efforts in AI include a shopping chatbot and other tools for its retail sites; AI-models-for-rent sold through its cloud-computing arm; and Prasad’s group, which built the algorithms behind the Alexa voice assistant and was restyled as Amazon’s artificial general intelligence unit in a reorganization last year.

Unlike some of its big tech peers like Microsoft Corp. and Google, Seattle-based Amazon hasn’t focused as much on developing a broader, more ambitious artificial general intelligence, or AGI, that can perform most intellectual tasks as well or better than humans.

The Adept agreement also comes at a time that technology companies have stepped up hiring from well-funded AI startups that are building costly foundational models. In March, Microsoft hired a large portion of the staff of Inflection AI and arranged a deal to license its technology for $650 million. That accord has since come under antitrust scrutiny by regulators at the FTC, according to the Wall Street Journal.

Zach Brock, Adept’s head of engineering, will take over as CEO. About 20 employees will remain on Adept’s staff, according to Amazon. Those staying on Adept’s team will continue to work on “solutions that enable agentic AI,” the startup said in its blog post.

--With assistance from Matt Day.

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