The reception area of Amazon’s office is pictured in New York City on May 1, 2019.
Carlo Allegri | Reuters
Amazon is accelerating the development of artificial intelligence technology, hiring top talent from AI agent startup Adept and licensing the company’s technology.
Rohit Prasad, a senior vice president and chief scientist who oversees Amazon’s artificial general intelligence unit, wrote in a memo to employees on Friday that the company has hired Adept co-founder and CEO David Luan and “a few others deeply talented members to our AGI team.”
Luan will oversee Amazon’s “AGI Autonomy” division and report to Prasad, he wrote in the memo, which CNBC obtained. Amazon confirmed the contents of the memo. Geekwire was the first to report on it.
Amazon faces fierce competition in AI as rivals Microsoft and Google rapidly add new features to their core products while also offering companies more ways to access large language models in their public cloud offerings. Amazon’s cloud unit has launched a range of AI services, including its own models, that are generally seen as lagging behind major competitors.
Amazon has also pumped billions of dollars into OpenAI competitor Anthropic and is planning to revamp its Alexa voice assistant with a new paid version that has generative AI capabilities. Prasad, who previously served as Alexa’s chief scientist, was hired in August to guide Amazon’s development of AGI, or software that is significantly more advanced than current AI and begins to approach human-level capabilities.
Last month, Amazon announced that Adam Selipsky, head of Amazon Web Services, would step down and be replaced by Matt Garman, head of sales and marketing at AWS.
Competition for talent is heating up across the industry.
Microsoft in March hired Mustafa Suleyman, a co-founder of Google’s DeepMind who led the startup Inflection AI. Microsoft has also hired several of Inflection’s top executives and is licensing some of its technology. The deal has drawn the attention of the Federal Trade Commission, which is investigating whether Microsoft structured the deal to avoid antitrust review, the Wall Street Journal reported.
Adept was founded in 2022 by a group of former OpenAI and Google engineers. The company quickly attracted support from Microsoft and Nvidia and was valued at more than $1 billion in early 2023.
Adept is a player in the growing AI agent space, which refers to AI tools equipped to complete complex tasks without human assistance. The startup was reportedly developing an agent that can perform actions on a computer on a user’s behalf, such as navigating web pages and logging data.
As part of Friday’s deal, Amazon will license Adept’s technology, multimodal models and some data sets, which “will accelerate our roadmap for building digital agents that can automate software workflows,” he wrote. Prasad. Amazon is using the technology under a non-exclusive license, the company said.
“David and his team’s experience in training state-of-the-art multimodal foundational models and building real-world digital agents aligns with our vision of delighting consumers and enterprise customers with practical AI solutions,” said Prasad.
Adept confirmed the change in a blog post. The company noted that developing its own AI models would require more capital and said the deal with Amazon will allow it to focus on building agents. Adept will continue to operate as an independent company after Luan and other executives join Amazon.
TO ATTEND: Amazon Web Services CEO Adam Selipsky to step down
