Amazon has made a significant move in the AI industry by hiring the co-founders and several team members from the AI startup Adept. This is a strategic recruitment similar to what was done by Microsoft that recently hired a team from another prominent AI start up, Inflection AI.
Recently, Adept, which has headquarters in San Francisco, said that its co-founder and chief operating officer, David Luan, along with other co-founders and employees at the start-up, will be joining Amazon. This startup having crossed over $1 billion in valuation and having raised more than $410 million, has already appointed a new CEO to continue its operations. Despite the exit of its key figures, Adept assures that it will remain independent from Amazon.
What is quite amusing is that Amazon has made this move barely a few days after Microsoft signed a $650 million licensing deal with Inflection AI, which the Federal Trade Commission is investigating. The FTC is investigating whether the deal was an attempt to bypass merger disclosure requirements.
This recruitment forms part of the plan to bridge the gap with other competitors in the AI space for Amazon. Reports state that it is reportedly investing heavily in developing a LLM model with hopes of rivaling Microsoft-Backed OpenAI and Alphabet. Beginning to prove that Amazon is serious about moving ahead in the development of AI agent tools, the huge momentum-creating niche of leading tech innovation hubs, by acquiring talent at Adept.
It’s also upgrading its Alexa voice assistant in an attempt to accomplish this. The idea is that, at some point in the future, generative AI capabilities will make it possible for Alexa to respond to the most complex type of prompts by answering lucidly and lengthy but almost instantaneously. This move is considered critical for Amazon to maintain its lead in the field of AI-powered assistants.
The new hires from Adept will report to Rohit Prasad, who oversees AGI work at Amazon. Prasad, who previously oversaw Alexa, now reports directly to Amazon CEO Andy Jassy. Lately, he has been core to the job of pulling together researchers and resources within the company to train AI models. In an internal memo, Prasad showed how the addition of the Adept team will dramatically push forward Amazon’s work on achieving AGI.
According to Amazon’s spokesperson, about 20 of its employees would stay back at Adept to keep the startup alive. Amazon has entered into a licensing partnership with Adept to use some of its systems; however, the details of this non-exclusive license have not been revealed.
Before deciding to partner with Amazon, Adept had discussions with other tech giants like Meta. However, Meta decided not to execute the deal. A Meta spokesperson declined to comment on this discussion.
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