Amazon is amping up its AI efforts by hiring executives from Adept, a San Francisco-based startup building “agents” that automate enterprise workflows.
Adept co-founder and CEO David Luan, the former vice president of engineering at OpenAI, will join Amazon. Adept co-founders Augustus Odena, Maxwell Nye, Erich Elsen, and Kelsey Szot will also move to Amazon, along with a few other employees.
Adept will continue operating as an independent company with its remaining workforce. Amazon will use some of Adept’s technology as part of a non-exclusive license.
Luan will report to Rohit Prasad, a longtime Amazon exec leading a new Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) team developing large language model technology at the Seattle company.
“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 (read in full below).
Prasad said the license from Adept “will accelerate our roadmap for building digital agents that can automate software workflows.”
Adept raised $350 million in March 2023 as part of a Series B round that reportedly valued the company at $1 billion. Its software is designed to help companies automate rudimentary tasks such as extracting information from documents, sending emails, processing applications, and more.
Adept was reportedly in talks with other tech giants in recent months about potential deals, including Meta and Microsoft, which previously invested in the startup.
The hiring of Adept’s leaders comes as tech behemoths look to partner with or acquire startups in a race to build out AI infrastructure and services. AI startups are also under pressure as they face large computing and labor costs without substantial revenue streams.
Amazon’s deal with Adept mirrors Microsoft’s recent hiring of Mustafa Suleyman, co-founder and former CEO of consumer chatbot startup Inflection AI, along with Inflection co-founder Karén Simonyan and other employees.
Regulators are scrutinizing AI deals between large tech corporations and smaller startups.
The Wall Street Journal reported this month that the FTC is investigating whether Microsoft structured a deal to gain control of Inflection without going through an FTC review. Microsoft previously invested in Inflection.
The FTC in January launched a separate inquiry into Microsoft’s investment in OpenAI, as well as Amazon’s investment into Anthropic, another hot AI startup.
In a blog post, Adept said that continuing the company’s plan to build “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.”
“Adept will now focus entirely on solutions that enable agentic AI, which will continue to be powered by a combination of our existing state-of-the-art in-house models, agentic data, web interaction software, and custom infrastructure,” the company said. “We look forward to continuing towards this vision and working with partners to bring agentic capabilities to their products and tools.”
Zach Brock, head of engineering at Adept, will take over as the new CEO. Tim Weingarten will remain head of product.
Adept has around 100 employees, according to LinkedIn. The company declined to share headcount numbers. Update: Amazon said around 20 employees will remain at Adept.
Amazon has been trying to demonstrate momentum in generative AI in Amazon Web Services and across its business, seeking to counter the perception that it has fallen behind in the AI technology race.
Business Insider reported this week that Amazon is developing its own consumer-focused AI chatbot that would compete with OpenAI’s ChatGPT and is powered by “Olympus,” its new large language model.
Reuters and CNBC reported recently about Amazon’s plans for a new version of its Alexa voice assistant, called “Remarkable Alexa,” including a paid tier.
Last year Amazon rolled out “Amazon Q,” a generative AI-powered assistant for enterprise use, and in February released Rufus, a new AI shopping assistant.
Luan co-founded Adept in 2022 with Niki Parmar and Ashish Vaswani, researchers from Google who later left to launch their own startup, Essential AI.
Adept investors include General Catalyst and Spark Capital — which led the Series B round — along with Workday Ventures, Atlassian Ventures, Greylock, Addition, and others.
Read the memo from Prasad to employees about the hiring of Adept’s leaders below. The memo was provided to GeekWire by Amazon.
Hi all – We’re always looking to add outstanding talent to advance our mission, and I’m excited to share a few updates with the team.
Please join me in welcoming David Luan, the Founder and former CEO of Adept, as well as his co-founders Augustus Odena, Maxwell Nye, Erich Elsen, and Kelsey Szot, and a few other deeply talented team members to our AGI team. 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. Amazon is also licensing Adept’s agent technology, family of state-of-the-art multimodal models, and a few datasets, which will accelerate our roadmap for building digital agents that can automate software workflows.
David will report into me as the leader of the “AGI Autonomy” team, and most of the team we are hiring will report through David. A few Product Design employees will report into Devices & Services through Mark Yoshitake.
David will also take ownership of our Automations team, and Shiv Vitaladevuni and his team will now report to David. The Automations team will remain focused on using foundational models to automate and optimize end-to-end workflows in virtual and physical environments.
Several of Adept’s prior team will remain part of Adept, where they will be continuing to operate independently with a product-focused mission.
I’m excited to welcome our new team members and believe that their expertise, experience, and entrepreneurial spirit will significantly help us on our quest to achieving AGI. Please cascade this email to your teams as needed.
Rohit
