Adept, a startup that develops AI-powered “agents” that perform a variety of software-based tasks, has agreed to license its technology to Amazon, with its co-founders and part of its team joining the e-commerce giant.
The news was first reported by Geekwire’s Taylor Soper, who said that Adept co-founder and CEO David Ruan would be joining Amazon, along with Adept co-founders Augustus Odena, Maxwell Nye, Eric Elsen, and Kelsey Szodt, as well as other Adept employees.
Adept is not going out of business, however: Zach Block, head of engineering, will take over as CEO and Adept will focus on “solutions that enable agent-based AI.”
“[Our products] Going forward, the company will continue to operate using a combination of state-of-the-art in-house facilities and existing equipment. [AI] “Adept would have had to pay significant attention to funding the foundational model, rather than delivering on its vision for the agent,” Adept said in an official blog post. “To continue Adept’s original plan of building both a useful general-purpose intelligence and enterprise agent product would have required significant attention to funding the foundational model.”
The deal represents a lifeline for Adept, which has reportedly been in talks over the past few months with Meta and Microsoft, who previously invested in the startup, about a potential acquisition.
Meanwhile, Amazon will gain valuable talent and technology to bolster its generative AI ambitions: Geekwire reports that Luan will report to former Alexa head Rohit Prasad, who is leading a new AGI team focused on building large-scale language models.
“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 of delighting consumer and enterprise customers with practical AI solutions,” Prasad wrote in a memo to employees obtained by Geekwire.[The license] It accelerates our roadmap towards building digital agents that can automate software workflows.”
Adept was founded two years ago with the goal of creating AI models that could use natural language to take actions in any software tool. Broadly speaking, its vision (now shared by OpenAI, Rabbit, and others) was to create a kind of “AI teammate” that was trained to use different software tools and APIs.
Adept’s technology has attracted backers including Nvidia, Atlassian, Workday and Greylock, and it has raised more than $415 million at a valuation of roughly $1 billion. But the startup has been plagued by dysfunction: Adept lost two of its co-founders, Ashish Vaswani and Niki Parmar, early on, and has struggled to bring its product to market despite months of testing.
The market for AI agents is a bit more crowded than it was when Adept launched, with well-funded startups like Orby and Emergence vying for a slice of the lucrative market. Market research firm Grand View Research estimates the AI agent space will be worth $4.2 billion in 2022.
But a deal with Amazon could get Adept across the finish line, or the departure of much of its executive ranks could send it to the same fate as AI startup Inflexion, which was essentially internally flushed out of the company by Microsoft earlier this year, or regulators who have become increasingly skeptical of these types of AI acquisition hires could step in (unless neutralized by Friday’s Supreme Court ruling).
Grab some popcorn, sit back and enjoy.
