Amazon is driving forward the event of its artificial intelligence technology, hiring top talent from AI agent startup Adept and licensing the corporate's technology.
Rohit Prasad, senior vp and chief scientist of Amazon's artificial intelligence division, wrote in a memo to employees on Friday that the corporate had hired Adept co-founder and CEO David Luan and “several other extremely talented team members to join our AGI team.”
Luan will lead Amazon's AGI Autonomy division and report back to Prasad, he wrote within the memo, which was obtained by CNBC. Amazon confirmed the contents of the memo. Geekwire was the primary to report on it.
Amazon faces tough competition within the AI space as rivals Microsoft And Google quickly construct recent features into their core products while giving firms more ways to access large language models of their public cloud offerings. Amazon's cloud division has launched a variety of AI services, including its own models, which might be widely viewed as lagging behind top competitors.
Amazon has also pumped billions of dollars into OpenAI competitor Anthropic and plans to revamp its voice assistant Alexa with a brand new paid version that features generative AI capabilities. Prasad, who previously served as chief scientist for Alexa, was hired in August to steer Amazon's development of AGI, software that’s significantly more advanced than current AI and approaches human capabilities.
Last month, Amazon announced that Adam Selipsky, the pinnacle of Amazon Web Services, would step down and get replaced by Matt Garman, AWS's head of sales and marketing.
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Microsoft hired Mustafa Suleyman, a co-founder of Google's DeepMind who later led the startup Inflection AI, in March. Microsoft also hired several top executives from Inflection and is the licensing a few of its technology. The agreement caught the eye of the Federal Trade Commission, which is investigating whether Microsoft structured the deal to avoid antitrust scrutiny. The Wall Street Journal reported.
Adept was founded in 2022 by a gaggle of former OpenAI and Google engineers. The company quickly gained the support of Microsoft And NVIDIA and was valued at over $1 billion in early 2023.
Adept is a player within the emerging field of AI agents, i.e. AI tools that may perform complex tasks without human assistance. The startup reportedly developed An agent that may perform actions on a pc on behalf of the user, akin to navigating web pages and logging data.
As a part of Friday's agreement, Amazon will license Adept's technology, multimodal models and a few data sets, which can “accelerate our plan to develop digital agents that can automate software workflows,” Prasad wrote. Amazon is using the technology under a non-exclusive license, the corporate said.
“David and his team’s expertise in training cutting-edge multimodal base models and building real-world digital agents aligns with our vision of inspiring consumer and enterprise customers with practical AI solutions,” said Prasad.
Adept confirmed the move in a blog post. The company noted that developing its own AI models would have required more capital, and said the Amazon deal will allow it to give attention to constructing agents. Adept will proceed to operate as a standalone company after Luan and other executives move to Amazon.
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