The front desk of Amazon’s office is pictured in New York, May 1, 2019.
Carlo Allegri | Reuters
Amazon is ramping up the development of artificial intelligence technology by hiring top talent from startup agent AI Adept and licensing the company’s technology.
Rohit Prasad, senior vice president and chief scientist overseeing Amazon’s artificial general intelligence unit, wrote in a memo to employees Friday that the company hired Adept co-founder and CEO David Luan and “several other deeply talented members of group in our AGI. club.”
Luan will oversee Amazon’s “AGI Autonomy” division and report to Prasad, he wrote in the memo, which was obtained by CNBC. Amazon confirmed the content of the note. Geekwire he was the first to report it.
Amazon faces intense competition in artificial intelligence as a rival Microsoft and Google rapidly adding new features to their core products while giving enterprises more ways to access large language models in their public cloud offerings. Amazon’s cloud unit has launched a number of AI services, including its own models, which are generally seen as lagging behind leading competitors.
Amazon has also pumped billions of dollars into OpenAI rival Anthropic, and plans to overhaul its Alexa voice assistant with a new paid version that has AI-building capabilities. Prasad, who previously served as chief scientist for Alexa, was tapped in August to lead Amazon’s development of AGI, or software that is significantly more advanced than current AI and begins to approach human-level abilities.
Last month, Amazon announced that Adam Selipsky, head of Amazon Web Services, would step down and be succeeded by Matt Garman, head of sales and marketing at AWS.
Talent wars are heating up across the industry.
Microsoft in March hired Mustafa Suleiman, the co-founder of Google’s DeepMind, who led the startup Inflection AI. Microsoft also brought in many of Inflection’s top executives and is licensing some of its technology. The deal drew the attention of the Federal Trade Commission, which is investigating whether Microsoft had structured the deal to avoid antitrust review, The Wall Street Journal mentionted.
Adept was founded in 2022 by a team of former OpenAI and Google engineers. The company quickly attracted his support Microsoft and Nvidia and valued at more than $1 billion in early 2023.
Adept is a player in the growing space of artificial intelligence agents, which refers to artificial intelligence tools that are equipped to complete complex tasks without human assistance. The startup was reportedly growing an agent that can perform actions on a computer on behalf of the user, such as browsing web pages and logging data.
As part of Friday’s deal, Amazon will license Adept’s technology, multimodal models and certain datasets, which will “accelerate our roadmap for building digital agents that can automate software workflows,” wrote Prasad. Amazon is using the technology under a non-exclusive license, the company said.
“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 consumers and enterprise customers with practical AI solutions,” said Prasad.
The Adept confirmed the move in a blog post. The company noted that developing its own AI models would require more capital and said the Amazon deal would allow it to focus on manufacturing agents. Adept will continue to operate as a standalone company after Luan and other Amazon executives join.
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