Adept, a startup developing AI-powered “agents” to finish various software-based tasks, has agreed to license its tech to Amazon and the startup’s co-founders and portions of its team have joined the ecommerce giant.
Geekwire’s Taylor Soper first reported the news. In response 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 and other Adept employees.
Adept isn’t closing up shop, nonetheless. Zach Brock, head of engineering, is taking on as CEO as Adept refocuses its efforts on “solutions that enable agentic AI.”
“[Our products] will proceed to be powered by a mix of our existing state-of-the-art in-house [AI] models, agentic data, web interaction software and custom infrastructure,” Adept wrote in a post on its official blog. “Continuing with Adept’s initial plan of constructing each useful general intelligence and an enterprise agent product would’ve required spending significant attention on fundraising for our foundation models, moderately than bringing to life our agent vision.”
The deal provides a lifeline for Adept, which has reportedly been in talks with Meta and Microsoft over the past few months a couple of potential acquisition. Microsoft previously invested within the startup.
As for Amazon, it gets invaluable talent — and tech to bolster its generative AI ambitions. Geekwire reports that Luan will work under Rohit Prasad, the previous Alexa head who’s leading a brand new AGI team focused on constructing large language models.
“David and his team’s expertise in training state-of-the-art multimodal foundational models and constructing real-world digital agents aligns with our vision to thrill consumer and enterprise customers with practical AI solutions,” Prasad wrote in a memo to employees obtained by Geekwire. “[The license] will speed up our roadmap for constructing digital agents that may automate software workflows.”
Adept was founded two years ago with the goal of making an AI model that may perform 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 an “AI teammate” of sorts trained to make use of a wide selection of various software tools and APIs.
Adept managed to win over backers including Nvidia, Atlassian, Workday and Greylock with its technology, raising over $415 million in capital and reaching a valuation of around $1 billion. However the startup’s been plagued with disfunction. Adept lost two of its co-founders, Ashish Vaswani and Niki Parmar, early on, and it’s struggled to bring any product to market despite months and months of testing.
The marketplace for AI agents is a tad more crowded than it was at Adept’s launch. Well-funded startups like Orby, Emergence and others are vying for a slice of what guarantees to be a lucrative pie; market research firm Grand View Research estimates that the AI agents segment was value $4.2 billion in 2022.
But perhaps the Amazon tie-in will get Adept over the finish line. Or — with much of its executive ranks departing — it’ll resign Adept to the identical fate as Inflection, the AI startup that was effectively gutted, talent-wise, by Microsoft earlier this 12 months. Or regulators increasingly skeptical of most of these AI aqui-hires will step in (in the event that they aren’t rendered toothless by Friday’s Supreme Court decision).
Grab your popcorn and settle in.
