• by Laurie Sullivan  @lauriesullivan, July 1, 2024

Amazon has increased its efforts in artificial "general" intelligence (AGI) for consumers and enterprises by hiring executives from Adept AI, a two-and-a-half-year-old startup that has devoted "significant attention" to its search for additional funding.

AGI, which Amazon defines as a field of theoretical AI research, attempts to create software with human-like intelligence and the ability to self-teach.

For advertisers, it would allow brands to create more personal messages in ads, depending on historic searches and purchases, among other data -- much more personal than its Rufus AI agent that searches for products based on ecommerce questions and recommendations. 

But Adept AI until now has been developing a general-purpose tool for enterprises that enables employees to spend more time on strategic thinking and creative endeavors and less time on tedious computer tasks. It pits itself against Google and Microsoft, both of which support enterprise clients with AI.

Adept co-founder and CEO David Luan will join Amazon’s AGI team, according to a post on the company’s blog. Luan has past ties to Google and OpenAI. 

“We’ve made significant progress, with both state-of-the-art performance with our models and happy beta customers,” the post reads. “We’ve deployed the Adept product in mission-critical production environments and achieved automating end-to-end workflows that have up to dozens of steps.”

Four additional co-founders and an undetermined number of other workers will also join the team, reported Bloomberg, citing a document.

It seems Adapt AI needed capital. Amazon will license Adept’s developing agents that can perform tasks autonomously, which classifies the AI technology as “general.” The idea is to help Amazon build products that can automate software work flows, Bloomberg reported, citing the memo.

Adept will continue to operate as an independent company with its remaining workforce. The company in the post said it will now focus “entirely on solutions that enable agentic AI, which will continue to be powered by a combination of our existing state-of-the-art in-house models, agentic data, web interaction software, and custom infrastructure.”

With more than 15 years of experience building software, head of engineering Zach Brock will become Adept’s CEO. Tim Weingarten will remain in the role of head of products.