The front desk of an Amazon office in New York on May 1, 2019.
Carlo Allegri | Reuters
Amazon is bolstering its artificial intelligence technology development by hiring top talent from AI agent startup Adept and licensing the company’s technology.
Rohit Prasad, Amazon’s senior vice president and chief scientist for artificial general intelligence, wrote in a memo to employees on Friday that the company had hired Adept co-founder and CEO David Luan along with “several highly talented team members to our AGI team.”
The memo, obtained by CNBC and first reported by Geekwire, said Luan would oversee Amazon’s “AGI Autonomy” division and report to Prasad. Amazon confirmed the contents of the memo.
Amazon faces stiff competition in AI as rivals Microsoft and Google add a steady stream of new features to their core products and give businesses more access to large language models through their public cloud services. Amazon’s cloud division has launched a range of AI services, including its own models, but is generally seen as lagging behind top rivals.
Amazon is also investing billions in Anthropic, an OpenAI competitor, to revamp its Alexa voice assistant with a new paid version that includes generative AI capabilities. Prasad, who previously served as Alexa’s chief scientist, was tapped in August to lead Amazon’s development of AGI, software that is significantly more advanced than current AI and is approaching human-level capabilities.
Last month, Amazon announced that Adam Selipsky, head of Amazon Web Services, would step down and be replaced by Matt Gurman, head of marketing and sales for AWS.
Competition for talent is intensifying across the industry.
In March, Microsoft hired Mustafa Suleiman, a co-founder of Google’s DeepMind who later went on to lead a startup called Inflection AI. Microsoft has also hired several of Inflection’s top executives and is licensing some of the company’s technology. The arrangement has attracted the attention of the Federal Trade Commission, which is investigating whether Microsoft engineered the deal to avoid antitrust scrutiny, The Wall Street Journal reported.
Adept was founded by a group of ex-OpenAI and Google engineers in 2022. The company quickly attracted backing from Microsoft and Nvidia and was valued at over $1 billion in early 2023.
Adept is a company in the fast-growing field of AI agents, which are AI tools that can complete complex tasks without human assistance. The startup is reportedly developing agents that can perform computer actions on a user’s behalf, such as navigating web pages or recording data.
As part of Friday’s deal, Amazon will license Adept’s technology, multimodal models and select datasets “to accelerate our roadmap toward building digital agents that can automate software workflows,” Prasad wrote. Amazon is using the technology under a non-exclusive license, the company said.
“David and his team’s expertise in training cutting-edge multi-modal foundational models and building real-world digital agents is aligned with our vision to delight consumers and enterprise customers with practical AI solutions,” Prasad said.
Adept confirmed the move in a blog post. The company noted that it needed more capital to develop its own AI models, and said the deal with Amazon would allow it to focus on building out its agents. Adept plans to continue operating as an independent company after Ruan and other executives join Amazon.
clock: Amazon Web Services CEO Adam Selipsky to step down
