The picture shows the front desk of Amazon’s office in New York on May 1, 2019.
Carlo Allegri | Reuters
Amazon It is stepping up the development of artificial intelligence technology, hiring top talents from artificial intelligence agency startup Adept, and licensing the company’s technology.
Rohit Prasad, senior vice president and chief scientist who oversees Amazon’s general artificial intelligence unit, wrote in a memo to employees on Friday that the company hired Adept co-founder and CEO David Luan and “some of our other talented team members at AGI.”
Luan wrote in the memo obtained by CNBC that he will be in charge of Amazon’s “AGI Autonomy” unit and report to Prasad. Amazon confirmed the contents of the memo. geek line was the first to report the incident.
Amazon faces fierce competition in artificial intelligence Microsoft and Google Quickly add new features to its core products while also providing enterprises with more ways to access large language models in their public cloud products. Amazon’s cloud unit has launched a range of artificial intelligence services, including its own models, that are often seen as lagging behind top rivals.
Amazon has also poured billions of dollars into OpenAI competitor Anthropic and plans to revolutionize its Alexa voice assistant by launching a new paid version with generative AI capabilities. Prasad, who previously served as Alexa’s chief scientist, was appointed in August this year to lead the development of Amazon’s AGI, software that is more advanced than current artificial intelligence and beginning to approach human levels.
Last month, Amazon announced that Amazon Web Services chief Adam Selipsky would resign and be replaced by AWS marketing and sales chief Matt Garman.
The war for talent across the industry is heating up.
Microsoft in March hired Mustafa Suleyman, who co-founded Google DeepMind and later led startup Inflection AI. Microsoft also hired several senior executives from Inflection Licensing Some of its techniques. The arrangement attracted the attention of the Federal Trade Commission, which is investigating whether Microsoft structured the deal to avoid antitrust scrutiny. wall street journal the report said.
Adept was launched in 2022 by a group of former OpenAI and Google engineer. The company quickly received support from all parties Microsoft and Nvidia Valuation in early 2023 exceeds $1 billion.
Adept is a player in the emerging field of artificial intelligence agents, which are artificial intelligence tools that can complete complex tasks without human assistance. start up Reportedly under development An agent that can perform operations on the computer on behalf of the user, such as browsing the web and logging data.
As part of Friday’s agreement, Amazon will license Adept’s technology, multimodal models and some data sets, which “will accelerate our roadmap to building digital agents capable of automating software workflows,” Prasad wrote. Amazon is using the technology under a non-exclusive license, the company said.
“David and his team have expertise in training state-of-the-art multi-modal base models and building real-world digital agents, which aligns with our ability to delight consumers and enterprise customers with practical AI solutions,” said Prasad. consistent with the vision.
Adept confirmed the move in a blog post. The company noted that developing its own artificial intelligence models would require more capital and said the Amazon deal would allow it to focus on building agents. Adept will continue to operate as an independent company after Luan and other executives join Amazon.
watch: Amazon Web Services CEO Adam Selipsky resigns