Amazon Becomes More AI Adept

Amazon recruited AI talent from startup Adept. It isn’t stealing—Amazon will license technology from Adept, including AI models and datasets. Amazon’s AI unit learned that the company hired Adept co-founder and CEO David Luan and “a few other deeply talented team members to our AGI team.”

There is fierce competition in AI, and Amazon competitors Microsoft and Google consistently add new features to their core products. They are providing businesses with more ways to access large language models (LLMs) in their public cloud offerings. Amazon’s cloud unit launched a range of AI services, including its own models, but they are viewed as lagging behind their top competitors.

Amazon is spending billions of dollars on OpenAI competitor Anthropic, and it will overhaul its Alexa voice assistant with a new paid version with generative AI capabilities.