Amazon Hires Founders Away from AI Startup Adept
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Reports on Amazon's acquisition of Adept AI's founders and tech licensing deal, illustrating the consolidation of AI agent capabilities within major tech companies, which has implications for AI governance and the concentration of advanced AI development.
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Summary
Amazon has hired Adept AI's co-founders and licensed its technology, with CEO David Luan joining Amazon's AGI team under Rohit Prasad. Adept, which raised over $415 million to build AI agents capable of operating software tools via natural language, will continue under new leadership focused on enterprise agentic AI solutions. The deal accelerates Amazon's roadmap for building digital agents that automate software workflows.
Key Points
- •Amazon hired Adept's co-founders including CEO David Luan, who will join Amazon's AGI team focused on large language models.
- •Adept licensed its AI technology to Amazon, including multimodal foundational models, agentic data, and web interaction software.
- •Adept raised $415M+ and reached ~$1B valuation but struggled to ship products; it will continue under new CEO Zach Brock.
- •The deal reflects consolidation in the AI agent space, with Amazon gaining talent and tech to compete in agentic AI.
- •The AI agents market was valued at $4.2B in 2022, with growing competition from startups like Orby and Emergence.
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Adept , a startup developing AI-powered “agents” to complete various software-based tasks, has agreed to license its tech to Amazon, and the startup’s co-founders and portions of its team have joined the e-commerce giant.
GeekWire’s Taylor Soper first reported the news. According to Soper, Adept co-founder and CEO David Luan will join Amazon, along with Adept co-founders Augustus Odena, Maxwell Nye, Erich Elsen and Kelsey Szot, as well as other Adept employees.
Adept isn’t closing up shop, however. Zach Brock, head of engineering, is taking over as CEO as Adept refocuses its efforts on “solutions that enable agentic AI.”
“[Our products] will continue to be powered by a combination of our existing state-of-the-art in-house [AI] models, agentic data, web interaction software and custom infrastructure,” Adept wrote in a post on its official blog. “Continuing with Adept’s initial plan of building both useful general intelligence and an enterprise agent product would’ve required spending significant attention on fundraising for our foundation models, rather than bringing to life our agent vision.”
The deal provides a lifeline for Adept, which has reportedly been in talks with Meta and Microsoft over the past few months about a potential acquisition. Microsoft previously invested in the startup.
As for Amazon, it gets valuable talent — and tech to bolster its generative AI ambitions. GeekWire reports that Luan will work under Rohit Prasad, the former Alexa head who’s leading a new AGI team focused on building large language models .
“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,” Prasad wrote in a memo to employees obtained by GeekWire. “[The license] will accelerate our roadmap for building digital agents that can automate software workflows.”
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Adept was founded two years ago with the goal of creating an AI model that can perform actions on
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