Greg Bensinger and Crystal Hu
(Reuters) – Amazon.com Inc has followed rival Microsoft Corp’s lead by hiring the co-founder and part of the team at artificial intelligence startup Adept Inc as the company tries to fight the perception that it is playing catch-up in the field.
Adept announced in a blog post on Friday that co-founder and CEO David Ruan, along with several other co-founders and employees, are joining Amazon (NASDAQ:
The San Francisco-based startup has raised more than $410 million, is valued at more than $1 billion, and has already appointed a new CEO.
The move is similar to one made by Microsoft, which in March fired many of Inflection AI’s executives and employees and agreed to pay about $650 million in licensing fees.
The deal has been subject to regulatory scrutiny, with the Federal Trade Commission investigating whether the deal was a ploy to avoid merger disclosure obligations, people familiar with the matter told Reuters earlier this month.
Adept said it will continue to operate independently from Amazon. Amazon will pay Adept a license fee to use some of its technology to help automate business functions. An Amazon spokesman declined to disclose terms of the nonexclusive agreement.
Reuters reported that Amazon is investing in training ambitious large-scale language models that it hopes will rival top models from Microsoft-backed OpenAI and Alphabet (NASDAQ:). Adept’s new addition signals the tech giant’s ambitions to tackle AI agent tools, an area of ​​focus for its leading labs.
Reuters reported earlier this month that Amazon is rushing to update its Alexa voice assistant to fully integrate generative AI that can respond to complex prompts and questions in complete sentences almost instantly.
An Amazon spokesman said Adept employees had already joined the company, and that about 20 Adept employees remain with the company. Adept did not respond to a request for comment.
At Amazon, Mr. Luan and several others will report to Rohit Prasad, who oversees artificial general intelligence, or AGI, while others will join teams developing devices and other services, according to an internal memo seen by Reuters.
Prasad, the former head of Alexa who now reports to Amazon CEO Andy Jassy, ​​brought in researchers working on Alexa AI and Amazon’s science team to work on developing training models, consolidating AI efforts across the company with dedicated resources.
In the memo, Prasad said the hires “will contribute significantly to our efforts towards achieving AGI.”
Adept also held talks with other tech companies, including Meta Inc. (NASDAQ:), but Meta decided not to pursue an alliance or partnership, people familiar with the matter told Reuters. Meta declined to comment.
