Amazon to license AI technology from Adept

• Company is planning to overhaul its Alexa voice assistant, introducing a new paid version with generative AI capabilities.
• Talent wars within the AI industry are intensifying as companies vie to attract the brightest minds in the field.

Amazon’s, the e-commerce giant, latest move to ramp up its development of AI capabilities, including the hiring of top talent from the AI agent startup Adept and the licensing of the company’s technology, underscores its ambitious goals to stay ahead of the curve in this critical field.

In a memo to employees, Rohit Prasad, the senior vice president and head scientist overseeing Amazon’s artificial general intelligence (AGI) unit, announced the hiring of Adept’s co-founder and CEO, David Luan, as well as a few other highly talented team members.

Luan will now lead Amazon’s “AGI Autonomy” division, reporting directly to Prasad. This strategic move not only strengthens Amazon’s AI expertise but also signals its determination to make significant strides in the realm of advanced AI, particularly in the development of AI agents capable of automating complex software workflows without human intervention.

The competitive landscape in the AI industry is fiercely contested, with Amazon facing formidable rivals such as Microsoft and Google, who have been rapidly integrating new AI features into their core products and offering businesses greater access to large language models through their public cloud services.

Bolstering AI capabilities

Amazon’s cloud unit has also launched a range of AI services, but industry analysts have generally viewed these offerings as lagging behind the top competitors.

In an effort to bolster its AI capabilities, Amazon has made substantial investments in other prominent AI players, including pumping billions of dollars into OpenAI competitor Anthropic.

Additionally, the company is planning to overhaul its Alexa voice assistant, introducing a new paid version with generative AI capabilities. The appointment of Prasad, a seasoned Alexa scientist, to lead the development of AGI further underscores Amazon’s commitment to advancing its AI prowess.

The talent wars within the AI industry are intensifying, as companies vie to attract the brightest minds in the field.

Microsoft’s recent hiring of Mustafa Suleyman, a co-founder of Google’s DeepMind, and several other top executives from the startup Inflection AI, has caught the attention of the Federal Trade Commission, which is investigating whether the deal was structured to avoid antitrust review.

Automating software workflows

Adept, the AI agent startup, was founded in 2022 by a group of former OpenAI and Google engineers. The company quickly gained the backing of industry giants like Microsoft and Nvidia, and was valued at over $1 billion in early 2023.

As part of the agreement with Amazon, the e-commerce giant will license Adept’s technology, multimodal models, and datasets, which Prasad believes will “accelerate our roadmap for building digital agents that can automate software workflows.”

The strategic move by Amazon highlights the company’s desire to leverage cutting-edge AI technology to enhance its offerings and stay ahead of the competition.

By integrating Adept’s expertise in training state-of-the-art multimodal foundational models and building real-world digital agents, Amazon aims to “delight consumer and enterprise customers with practical AI solutions,” as Prasad stated.