(Bloomberg) — Amazon.com Inc. has hired executives from startup Adept AI Labs as the e-commerce and cloud-computing giant moves to ramp up its development of artificial general intelligence, an advanced version of AI that can think like humans.
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Adept co-founder and former CEO David Leung will join Amazon’s AGI autonomy team, led by Rohit Prasad, according to an internal memo provided to Bloomberg by Amazon, with the other four co-founders and an unspecified number of team members also joining Prasad’s group.
According to the memo, Amazon will license Adept’s technology development agents, AI tools that can perform tasks autonomously, to help develop products that can automate software workflows. Representatives for the companies declined to disclose financial terms, and Amazon would not say how many Adept employees it has hired.
Adept raised $350 million last March from investors including General Catalyst and Spark Capital at a valuation of at least $1 billion, as Forbes previously reported. In a blog post announcing the deal on Friday, Adept said its plans to focus on building both foundational AI models and enterprise tools “would have required us to devote significant attention to fundraising the foundational model rather than delivering on our vision for the agent.”
Adept will continue to operate separately, with its remaining staff and a more product-focused mission, according to a memo Prasad sent to Amazon staff.
“David and his team’s expertise in training cutting-edge multimodal 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 staff. Ruan will report to Prasad as the lead for the AGI autonomy and automation teams, according to the memo.
Amazon’s AI efforts include shopping chatbots and other tools for its retail sites, rent-a-AI models sold through its cloud-computing division, and Prasad’s group, which built the algorithms behind the Alexa voice assistant and was restructured as Amazon’s artificial general intelligence unit in a reorganization last year.
Unlike other big tech companies such as Microsoft and Google, Seattle-based Amazon has not focused much on developing a broader, more ambitious line of artificial general intelligence (AGI) that could perform most mental tasks as well as or better than humans.
The Adept deal also comes at a time when tech companies are stepping up recruitment from well-funded AI startups that are building costly underlying models. In March, Microsoft hired most of Inflection AI’s staff and inked a deal to license the company’s technology for $650 million. The deal has since come under antitrust scrutiny from FTC regulators, according to The Wall Street Journal.
Adept’s head of engineering, Zach Block, will become CEO. Amazon said about 20 employees will remain on Adept’s staff. Those remaining on the Adept team will continue working on “solutions that enable agent AI,” the startup said in a blog post.
–With assistance from Matt Day.
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