AI Pioneer David Luan Leaves Adept/Amazon
David Luan, a key figure in the AI space with a resume spanning OpenAI, Google, and Adept, has announced he is leaving his role. Luan, who ran a lab at Amazon after it acquired his startup Adept, said he is departing to build new AGI capabilities. His next move will be closely watched within the SF AI community.
Before his brief tenure at Amazon, David Luan was the CEO of Adept AI, a company he co-founded in 2022 with former Google researchers Ashish Vaswani and Niki Parmar. Vaswani and Parmar were part of the team that invented the Transformer architecture, a foundational technology for modern AI. Adept set out to build a "universal controller" that could automate software tasks using natural language commands, essentially an AI assistant that could work across any application. Adept raised a total of $415 million and was valued at over $1 billion, with backing from major players like General Catalyst, Spark Capital, Microsoft, and Nvidia. The company's flagship project was ACT-1, an AI agent designed to interact with software in the same way a human does. The move to Amazon in June 2024 wasn't a traditional acquisition. Instead, Amazon hired Luan and the majority of Adept's co-founders and staff, while also licensing Adept's technology. This "acqui-hire" model mirrors Microsoft's deal with Inflection AI and is seen as a way for large tech companies to quickly onboard top AI talent and technology while navigating potential antitrust scrutiny. The deal was reportedly structured to repay Adept's investors, who had put $414 million into the startup. Adept itself, with a smaller team, was to continue operating independently. This arrangement highlights the immense financial pressures on AI startups, which face high costs for computing power and talent, making it difficult to compete with tech giants. At Amazon, Luan led the San Francisco-based AGI lab and was central to the development of the Nova AI models, including the Nova Act agent integrated into Alexa Plus. His departure after less than two years comes as Amazon works to compete with the AI offerings of its rivals. Some internal sentiment at Amazon has reportedly labeled their own AI products as "Amazon Basics," suggesting a perception that they are not keeping pace. Luan's career has placed him at the center of key developments in the AI industry. Before Adept, he was the VP of Engineering at OpenAI from 2017 to 2020, where he was involved in shipping models like GPT, CLIP, and DALL-E. He also co-led Google Brain and headed Google's large model initiatives. His next venture will be closely followed by those tracking the race to build artificial general intelligence.
