Adept, a startup that develops artificial intelligence “agents” to perform a variety of software-based tasks, has agreed to license its technology to Amazon, with the startup’s co-founders and some of its team joining the e-commerce giant.
Taylor Soper from Geekwire for the first time 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.
Adept, nonetheless, does not close shop. Zach Brock, head of engineering, takes over as CEO as Adept refocuses its efforts on “solutions that enable agent-based AI.”
“[Our products] will continue to be powered by a combination of our existing, state-of-the-art, in-house solution [AI] models, agent data, web interaction software and custom infrastructure,” wrote Adept in: fasting on the official blog. “Continuing with Adept’s original plan to create both a usable general intelligence and an enterprise agent product would require significant attention to be devoted to fundraising for our foundation models rather than bringing our agent vision to life.”
The agreement provides salvation for the Adept, who was reportedly in talks Meta AND Microsoft in the past few months about a potential acquisition. Microsoft previously invested in the startup.
As for Amazon, it’s gaining precious talent — and technology — to bolster its generative AI ambitions. Geekwire reports that Luan will work under the leadership of Rohit Prasad, the former Alexa boss who is leading a latest AGI team focused on building large language models.
“David and his team’s expertise in training cutting-edge multimodal core models and building real-world digital agents aligns with our vision of delighting consumer and enterprise customers with actionable AI solutions,” Prasad wrote in a memo to employees obtained by Geekwire. “[The license] will speed up our roadmap to create digital agents that may automate software workflows.”
Adept was founded two years ago with the goal of creating an artificial intelligence model that may perform actions on any software tool using natural language. At a high level, the vision – a vision currently shared by OpenAI, Rabbit and others – was to create a sort of “AI teammate” trained to make use of a wide selection of different software tools and APIs.
Adept has attracted backers on its technology, including Nvidia, Atlassian, Workday, and Greylock, raising greater than $415 million in capital and reaching a valuation of about $1 billion. But the startup has struggled. Adept lost two co-founders, Ashish Vaswani and Niki Parmar, early on, and has struggled to bring any product to market despite months of testing.
The AI agent market is a bit more crowded than when Adept launched. Well-funded startups like Orby, Emergence and others are vying for a piece of what guarantees to be a lucrative pie; market research company Grand View Research estimates that the AI agent segment can be value $4.2 billion in 2022.
But perhaps the Amazon tie-up will help Adept cross the finish line. Or — with most of its executives gone — Adept can be doomed to the same fate as Inflection, the AI startup that was effectively gutted of talent by Microsoft earlier this yr. Or regulators will grow to be increasingly skeptical of this kind of AI aqui-tenants (unless Friday’s Supreme Court decision knocks their teeth out).
Prepare some popcorn and sit back.