Adept said in a blog post Friday that cofounder and CEO
David Luan, as well as several other co-founders and employees were leaving to
join Amazon.
The San Francisco-based startup, which has raised over $410
million and is valued above $1 billion, already named a new CEO.
The move is similar to one by Microsoft, which in March
hired away much of Inflection AI’s leadership and employees and agreed to pay a
roughly $650 million licensing fee.
That deal has attracted regulatory scrutiny – the Federal
Trade Commission is looking into whether the deal was a play to skirt merger
disclosure requirements, a person told Reuters earlier this month.
Adept said it would continue to operate independently of
Amazon. Amazon will pay Adept a licensing fee to use some of its technology,
which helps automate business functions. An Amazon spokesperson declined to
disclose terms of the non-exclusive deal.
Amazon is investing towards training an ambitious large
language model, Reuters has reported, hoping it could rival top models from
Microsoft-backed OpenAI and Alphabet. The new additions from Adept signal the
tech giant’s ambition to work on AI agents tools, an area major labs are
focusing on.
Reuters reported earlier this month that Amazon is racing to
update its Alexa voice assistant to fully integrate generative AI, which can
respond almost instantaneously with full sentences to complicated prompts or
queries.
The Amazon spokesperson said the Adept employees have
already joined the company and about 20 Adept workers remain at the startup.
Adept didn’t respond to a request for comment.
At Amazon, Luan and a number of others will report to Rohit
Prasad, who oversees artificial general intelligence, or AGI. Others will join
the team developing devices and other services, according to an internal memo
viewed by Reuters.
Prasad, the former head of Alexa, who now reports directly
to Amazon CEO Andy Jassy, brought in researchers working on Alexa AI and the
Amazon science team to work on training models, uniting AI efforts across the
company with dedicated resources.
Prasad said in the memo that the hires “will significantly
help us on our quest to achieving AGI.”
Adept also held discussions with other tech companies including Meta, which decided not to pursue a tie-up or partnership, sources familiar with the matter told Reuters. Meta declined to comment. Reuters
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