"Adept's co-founder and former CEO David Luan subsequently became the head of Amazon's new AGI Lab, and while Luan's recent interview with The Verge is ostensibly focused on Amazon's vision for AI agents, reporter Alex Heath also asked him about the reverse acquihire trend. "So I hope, in 50 years, I'm remembered more as being an AI research innovator rather than a deal structure innovator," Luan said. But from his perspective, it's "perfectly rational" for companies like Amazon to "put together critical mass on both talent and compute right now.""
"As for why he was willing to leave his startup for Amazon, Luan said he wasn't interested in turning Adept into a "an enterprise company that only sells small models" - he wanted to solve "the four crucial remaining research problems left to AGI." "Every single one of them is going to require two-digit billion-dollar clusters to go run it," he said. "How else am I [...] going to have the opportunity to go do that?""
Amazon executed a reverse acquihire by hiring Adept’s founders and licensing their technology, integrating key talent into an internal AGI Lab. David Luan moved from Adept to lead Amazon’s AGI Lab and emphasized a desire to pursue ambitious AGI research rather than pivot to enterprise small-model sales. Luan described industry consolidation of talent and compute as a rational response to the resource needs of advanced AI. He identified four remaining crucial research problems for AGI and stated that each would require two-digit billion-dollar compute clusters to run and validate solutions.
Read at TechCrunch
Unable to calculate read time
Collection
[
|
...
]