Amazon intensifies AI advancements by recruiting top talent from Adept and acquiring its technology.

• Adept's top executives have been hired by Amazon, the company confirmed.
• Adept will license some of its AI models and datasets to Amazon as part of the deal.
• To remain competitive in AI, Amazon has been developing services and investing in Anthropic, an OpenAI competitor.

Adept's AI technology is being licensed and top talent from the company is being hired by the company to ramp up its development of artificial intelligence technology.

On Friday, Rohit Prasad, senior vice president and head scientist of Amazon's artificial general intelligence unit, announced in a memo to employees that the company had hired Adept co-founder and CEO David Luan and other talented team members to join their AGI team.

Luan will lead Amazon's "AGI Autonomy" division and report to Prasad, as stated in the memo obtained by CNBC. Amazon has confirmed the contents of the memo. Geekwire was the first to report on it.

Amazon's cloud unit is lagging behind its top competitors in AI, as rivals rapidly add new features to their core products and provide businesses with more ways to access large language models in their public cloud offerings.

Amazon has invested billions of dollars in Anthropic, an OpenAI competitor, and plans to revamp its Alexa voice assistant with a paid version that incorporates generative AI capabilities. Prasad, who previously served as a head scientist for Alexa, was appointed in August to lead Amazon's development of AGI, which is significantly more advanced than current AI and aims to approximate human-level capabilities.

Last month, Amazon Web Services' head of sales and marketing, Matt Garman, was appointed as the new head of Amazon Web Services, replacing Adam Selipsky.

Talent wars are heating up across the industry.

In March, Microsoft hired Mustafa Suleyman, a cofounder of Google's DeepMind, who later led startup Inflection AI. Microsoft also recruited several of Inflection's top executives and is licensing some of its technology. This arrangement attracted the attention of the Federal Trade Commission, which is investigating whether Microsoft structured the deal to evade antitrust review, according to a report in The Wall Street Journal.

In 2022, a group of former OpenAI and engineers founded Adept, which quickly attracted the backing of $ and $ and was valued at more than $1 billion in early 2023.

An AI tool that can perform complex tasks without human assistance is a player in the burgeoning space of AI agents. The startup was reportedly developing an agent that can perform actions on a computer on the user's behalf, such as navigating webpages and logging data.

Amazon has licensed Adept's technology, multimodal models, and some datasets to accelerate its roadmap for building digital agents that can automate software workflows, according to Prasad. The license is non-exclusive, the company stated.

Prasad stated that David and his team's proficiency in developing cutting-edge multimodal foundational models and constructing real-world digital agents matches our objective of providing practical AI solutions that satisfy both consumer and enterprise customers.

Adept announced in a blog post that it has confirmed the move to partner with Amazon. The company stated that developing its own AI models would have required more capital, and the Amazon deal will enable it to concentrate on developing agents. After Luan and other executives join Amazon, Adept will remain as a standalone company.

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