Adept, a startup developing AI-powered “agents” to complete various software-based tasks, has agreed to license its technology to Amazon as the startup’s co-founders and parts of its team join the e-commerce giant.
Taylor Soper first from Geekwire mentioned According to Super, Adept co-founder and CEO David Luan will join Amazon, along with Adept co-founders Augustus Odina, Maxwell Ni, Eric Elsen, Kelsey Zott, and other Adept employees.
However, Adept is not closing its doors. Zach Brock, head of engineering, will take over as CEO of the company, while Adept refocuses its efforts on “solutions that enable agentic AI.”
“[Our products] It will continue to be powered by a combination of our state-of-the-art technology [AI] “Forms, proxy data, web interactivity software and custom infrastructure,” Adept wrote in one article. mail “Continuing with Adept’s initial plan to build both a useful general intelligence and Enterprise Agent product would have required spending a significant amount of attention on fundraising for our Enterprise models, rather than bringing our Agent vision to life,” she wrote on her official blog.
The deal provides a lifeline to Adept, which was reportedly in talks with Meta And Microsoft over the past few months about a potential acquisition. Microsoft previously invested in the startup.
As for Amazon, it is acquiring valuable talent and technology to advance its ambitions in the field of artificial intelligence. Geekwire reports that Luan will report to Rohit Prasad, the former Alexa boss who is leading a new AGI team focused on building large language models.
“David and his team’s experience training sophisticated multimedia platform models and building real-world digital agents aligns with our vision of delighting consumer and business customers with practical AI solutions,” Prasad wrote in a memo to employees obtained by GeekWire.[The license] “This will accelerate our roadmap to building digital agents capable of automating software workflows.”
Adept was founded two years ago with the goal of creating an AI model that could perform actions on any software tool using natural language. At a high level, the vision—one now shared by OpenAI, Rabbit, and others—was to create an “AI teammate” trained to use a wide range of different software tools and APIs.
Adept managed to win the backing of several companies including Nvidia, Atlassian, Workday, and Greylock with its technology, and raised more than $415 million in capital and reached a market cap of nearly $1 billion. But the startup suffered from glitches. Adept lost two of its co-founders, Ashish Vaswani and Niki Parmar, early on, and struggled to bring any product to market despite months and months of testing.
The market for AI agents is much more crowded than it was when Adept launched. Well-funded startups like Orby, Emergence, and others are competing for a share of the pie that promises to be profitable; Market research company Grand View Research Estimates The AI agent industry is expected to reach $4.2 billion in 2022.
But the Amazon tie-up may be enough to get Adept over the finish line. Or—with so many of its top executives gone—Adept may succumb to the same fate as Inflection, the AI startup that Microsoft destroyed in talent earlier this year. Or that may be the case with Inflection. Organizers Increasingly, skeptics of these types of AI employees will be intervening (if they aren’t rendered toothless by Friday’s Supreme Court decision).
Grab your popcorn and settle in.