Experta startup developing AI-based “agents” to perform various software tasks, has agreed to license its technology to Amazon and the startup’s co-founders and part of its team have joined the e-commerce giant.
Geekwire’s Taylor Soper first reported According to Soper, Adept co-founder and CEO David Luan will join Amazon, alongside Adept co-founders Augustus Odena, Maxwell Nye, Erich Elsen and Kelsey Szot, as well as other Adept employees.
Adept is not closing up shop, however. Zach Brock, head of engineering, takes over as general manager of the company, while Adept refocuses its efforts on “solutions that enable agentic AI.”
“(Our products) will continue to be powered by a combination of our existing industry-leading internal (AI) models, agentic data, web interaction software and custom infrastructure,” Adept wrote in a statement. job on his official blog. “Pursuing Adept’s original plan to create both a useful general intelligence and an enterprise agent product would have required devoting significant attention to fundraising for our foundation models, rather than bringing our agent vision to life.”
The deal provides a lifeline to Adept, which has reportedly been in talks with Meta And Microsoft in recent months regarding a possible acquisition. Microsoft has already invested in the startup.
As for Amazon, it has valuable talent and technology to bolster its generative AI ambitions. Geekwire reports that Luan will work under Rohit Prasad, the former Alexa chief who is leading a new AGI team focused on construction large language models.
“David and his team’s expertise in training cutting-edge multi-modal foundational models and creating real-world digital agents aligns with our vision of delighting consumers and businesses with practical AI solutions ” Prasad wrote in a memo to employees obtained by Geekwire. “(The license) will accelerate our roadmap for creating digital agents capable of automating software workflows.”
Adept was founded two years ago with the aim of creating an AI model capable of performing 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 a sort of “AI teammate” trained to use a wide variety of different software tools and APIs.
Adept has successfully won 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 dysfunctions. Adept lost two of its co-founders, Ashish Vaswani and Niki Parmar, early on and struggled to bring a product to market despite months and months of testing.
The AI agent market is a bit more crowded than it was when Adept launched. Well-funded startups like Orby, Emergence and others compete for a piece of what promises to be a lucrative pie; market research firm Grand View Research estimates that the AI agent segment would be worth $4.2 billion in 2022.
But perhaps the tie-up with Amazon will get Adept across the finish line. Or, with the departure of a large part of its senior management, Adept will suffer the same fate as Inflection, the artificial intelligence start-up which was created in 2008. actually emptiedfrom a talent perspective, by Microsoft earlier this year. Or regulators increasingly skeptical of these types of AI hirers will step in (if they are not made toothless by the Supreme Court’s decision on Friday).
Grab your popcorn and sit down.
