Amazon poaches co-founders from agentic AI firm Adept

Adept, an artificial intelligence (AI) company that has been focusing on general AI and agentic AI, has announced that Amazon has hired its co-founders and some of its team to work within Amazon's Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) division.

With the leader gone, Adept's Head of Engineering, Zach Brock, is taking over as Adept's CEO. According to the company, Brock has 15 years of experience building software products and leading teams at large and small companies so is well-positioned to run Adept.

The company said that it can't continue working on general AI because of the significant attention and fundraising it requires. Therefore, it is focusing entirely on its agentic AIs which Amazon will be licensing alongside a family of state-of-the-art multimodal models and a few datasets.

For anyone who may not have heard of it, agentic AI can operate with minimal human oversight - it takes initiative, makes decisions, and does tasks on its own to work towards complex goals that the user has defined. They are also adaptable, able to change their plans and actions based on changing circumstances.

If you're not familiar with Adept, here is some work that it has been doing in its two-and-a-half years of operations:

"We have always believed that the complexity of software in the workplace is the best training ground for our models. To that end, we’ve been developing a general-purpose tool for enterprises that enables their employees to spend more time on strategic thinking and creative endeavors and less time on tedious computer tasks by delegating those to our Agent. We’ve made significant progress, with both state-of-the-art performance with our models and happy beta customers. 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. From our conversations with existing beta customers and prospects, it’s clear that there is tremendous potential and intense interest in the technology we’re building."

Adept didn't share information about how Amazon plans to use the licensed technology. Hopefully, we'll hear more from Amazon on this in the future.

Source: Adept