Adept, a startup that develops artificial intelligence “agents” to complete various software-based tasks, has agreed to license its technology to Amazon, and the startup’s co-founders and parts of its team have joined the e-commerce giant.
First up is Geekwire’s Taylor Soper mentionted 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 and other Adept employees.
However, Adept isn’t closing up shop. Zach Brock, chief engineer, takes over as CEO as Adept refocuses efforts on “AI-enabled solutions.”
“[Our products] will continue to be powered by a combination of our existing state-of-the-art technology in-house [AI] models, agent data, web interaction software, and custom infrastructure,” Adept wrote in a Position on her official blog. “Continuing with Adept’s original plan to build both useful general intelligence and an enterprise agent product would require significant attention to be spent on fundraising for our foundation models, rather than bringing our agent vision to life.”
The deal provides a lifeline for Adept, which is reportedly in talks After and Microsoft in recent months regarding a potential acquisition. Microsoft has previously invested in the startup.
As for Amazon, it’s getting valuable talent — and technology to boost its AI ambitions. Geekwire reports that Luan will work under Rohit Prasad, the former head of Alexa who is leading a new AGI team focused on building large language models.
“David and his team’s expertise in training state-of-the-art multimodal fundamental models and building real-world digital agents aligns with our vision to delight consumers and enterprise customers with practical AI solutions,” Prasad wrote in a note to employees received by Geekwire. “[The license] will accelerate our roadmap to create digital agents that can automate software workflows.”
Adept was founded two years ago with the goal of creating an AI model that can perform actions on any software tool using natural language. At a high level, the vision—a vision now shared by OpenAI, Rabbit, and others—was to create an “artificial intelligence team” of sorts that trains itself to use a wide variety of different software tools and APIs.
Adept managed to win over backers such as Nvidia, Atlassian, Workday and Greylock with its technology, raising over $415 million in capital and reaching a valuation of around $1 billion. But the startup is plagued by dysfunction. Adept lost two of its co-founders, Ashish Vaswani and Niki Parmar, early on, and has struggled to bring any product to market despite months and months of testing.
The market for AI agents is a bit more crowded than it was at Adept’s launch. Well-funded startups like Orby, Emergence and others are vying for a piece of what promises to be a lucrative pie. market research firm Grand View Research calculates that the AI agent segment was worth $4.2 billion in 2022.
But maybe Amazon’s draw will see Adept cross the finish line. Or — with much of its executives leaving — will Adept resign to the same fate as Inflection, the artificial intelligence startup that was effectively axed, talent-wise, by Microsoft earlier this year. THE regulatory authorities Increasingly skeptical of these types of AI hires will chime in (if they aren’t swayed by Friday’s Supreme Court decision).
Grab your popcorn and settle in.
