AdeptA startup that develops AI-powered “agents” to complete various software-based tasks, has agreed to license its technology to Amazon as the startup’s co-founders and parts of its team join the e-commerce giant.
Geekwire’s Taylor Soper first reported 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 is not going out of business. Zach Brock, head of engineering, will take over as CEO as Adept refocuses his efforts on “solutions that enable agent AI.”
“[Our products] It will continue to operate with a combination of our existing state-of-the-art internal systems. [AI] models, agent data, web interaction software, and custom infrastructure,” Adept wrote in a mail on his official blog. “Continuing with Adept’s initial plan to develop actionable general intelligence and an enterprise agent product would have required dedicating significant attention to fundraising for our core models, rather than realizing our agent vision.”
The deal provides a lifeline for Adept, which has reportedly been in talks with Goal and microsoft In recent months there has been talk of a possible acquisition. Microsoft had already invested in the startup.
As for Amazon, it is gaining valuable talent and technology to bolster its generative AI ambitions. Geekwire reports that Luan will work with Rohit Prasad, the former Alexa director who is leading a new construction-focused AGI team. great language models.
“David and his team’s experience in training next-generation multimodal core models and building real-world digital agents aligns with our vision of delighting enterprise and consumer customers with practical AI solutions,” Prasad wrote. in a memo to employees obtained by Geekwire. “[The license] “It 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 in 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 kind of “AI teammate” trained to use a wide variety of different software tools and APIs.
Adept managed to attract investors such as Nvidia, Atlassian, Workday and Greylock with its technology, raising more than $415 million in capital and reaching a valuation of around $1 billion. But the startup has been plagued by dysfunction. Adept lost two of its co-founders, Ashish Vaswani and Niki Parmar, early on, and has struggled to bring any products to market despite months and months of testing.
The AI agent market is a little more crowded than at Adept’s launch. Well-funded startups like Or by, Appearance and others compete for a slice of what promises to be a lucrative pie; market research company Grand View Research Dear All that the AI agent segment would be worth $4.2 billion by 2022.
But perhaps the alliance with Amazon will get Adept over the finish line. Or, with the departure of a large part of its executives, Adept will suffer the same fate as Inflection, the artificial intelligence startup that was effectively gutted, in terms of talent, by Microsoft earlier this year. EITHER regulators There are growing skeptics about this type of AI, and AI employees will step in (if not served). without teeth by the Supreme Court’s decision on Friday).
Grab your popcorn and settle in.