Adept, a startup that develops ai-powered “agents” to complete various software-based tasks, has agreed to license its technology to amazon, with the startup’s co-founders and parts of its team joining the e-commerce giant.
Taylor Soper, the first of Geekwire amazon-hires-founders-from-well-funded-enterprise-ai-startup-adept-to-boost-tech-giants-agi-team/”>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 isn't going out of business, though. Head of Engineering Zach Brock will take over as CEO as Adept refocuses its efforts on “solutions that enable agent ai.”
“(Our products) will continue to be powered by a combination of our state-of-the-art in-house (ai) models, agency data, web engagement software, and custom infrastructure,” Adept wrote in a ai/blog/adept-update”>mail on his official blog. “Continuing with Adept's initial plan to create useful general intelligence and an enterprise agent product would have required dedicating a lot of 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 ai-agent-startup-adept-has-talked-to-potential-buyers-including-meta?rc=rgg6ax”>Goal and ai-startup-adept-microsoft-deal-talks/”>Microsoft in recent months about a possible acquisition. Microsoft previously invested in the startup.
As for amazon, it gains valuable talent and technology to bolster its generative ai ambitions. Geekwire reports that Luan will work with Rohit Prasad, the former head of Alexa who is leading a new AGI team focused on building large language models.
“David and his team's experience in training next-generation multimodal foundational models and building real-world digital agents aligns with our vision of delighting consumers and enterprise customers with practical ai solutions,” Prasad wrote in a memo to employees obtained by Cable Geek. “(The license) 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 sort of “ai teammate” capable of using a wide variety of different software tools and APIs.
Adept managed to win over backers like 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 product to market despite months and 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 slice of what promises to be a lucrative pie; market research firm Grand View Research ai-autonomous-agents-market-report”>Dear All that the ai agent segment would be worth $4.2 billion by 2022.
But perhaps the amazon tie-up will get Adept over the line. Or, with much of its executive ranks gone, it will give up Adept to meet the same fate as Inflection, the ai startup that was effectively destroyed, talent-wise, by Microsoft earlier this year. Or regulators Increasing skeptics of such ai acquisitions will weigh in (if they aren't crippled by Friday's Supreme Court decision).
Grab your popcorn and settle in.
