Adept, a startup that develops AI-powered “agents” to perform 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.
Taylor Soper of Geekwire first reported the news. According to Soper, Adept co-founder and CEO David Luan will join Amazon together with Adept co-founders Augustus Odena, Maxwell Nye, Erich Elsen and Kelsey Szot, in addition to other Adept employees.
However, Adept won’t close shop. Zach Brock, chief technology officer, will take over as CEO while Adept focuses its efforts on “solutions that enable agent-based AI.”
“(Our products) will proceed to be powered by a mixture of our existing state-of-the-art internal (AI) models, agent data, web interaction software and custom infrastructure,” Adept wrote in a post on its official blog. “If we had continued with Adept's original plan to develop each useful general information and an enterprise agent product, we might have needed to spend loads of time raising funds for our base models as an alternative of turning our agent vision into reality.”
The deal is a rescue for Adept, which is reportedly in talks with Meta And Microsoft in recent months a few possible takeover. Microsoft had already invested within the startup.
Amazon, in turn, is gaining helpful talent — and technology — to bolster its generative AI ambitions. Geekwire reports that Luan will work under Rohit Prasad, the previous Alexa boss who’s leading a brand new AGI team focused on constructing large language models.
“David and his team's expertise in training cutting-edge multimodal base models and constructing real-world digital agents aligns with our vision of delighting consumer and enterprise customers with practical AI solutions,” Prasad wrote in a memo to employees obtained by Geekwire. “(The license) will speed up our plan to construct digital agents that may automate software workflows.”
Adept was founded two years ago with the goal of constructing an AI model that might use natural language to perform actions on any software tool. At a high level, the vision – a vision now shared by OpenAI, Rabbit and others – was to create a type of “AI teammate” trained to make use of quite a lot of different software tools and APIs.
Adept's technology won over investors reminiscent of Nvidia, Atlassian, Workday and Greylock, raised over $415 million in capital and reached a valuation of around $1 billion. But the startup was suffering from failures. Adept lost two of its co-founders, Ashish Vaswani and Niki Parmar, early on, and despite months of testing, it struggled to bring a product to market.
The marketplace for AI agents is a little more crowded than it was when Adept was launched. Well-funded startups like Orby, Emergence and others are vying for a bit of the promising pie. Market research firm Grand View Research Estimates that the AI agent segment was value $4.2 billion in 2022.
But perhaps the Amazon tie-up will get Adept over the finish line. Or, with much of the corporate's leadership team leaving, Adept will suffer the identical fate as Inflection, the AI startup that was virtually gutted for talent by Microsoft earlier this yr. Or Regulatory authorities However, increasingly people will probably be joining in who’re increasingly skeptical of this sort of AI aqui-hire (unless Friday's Supreme Court decision shows them its toothlessness).
Grab your popcorn and make yourself comfortable.
