When Amazon hired the founders of AI start-up Adept last year, it helped popularize what’s now called a reverse acqui-hire, where a big tech company hires a start-up’s top talent and licenses its technology rather than buying the entire business.
Adept’s co-founder and former CEO David Luan now leads Amazon’s AGI Lab, where the company is pursuing ambitious research into artificial general intelligence. In a recent interview with The Verge, Luan defended the unconventional deal, while also emphasizing that he prefers to be seen as an “AI research innovator rather than a deal structure innovator.”
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Still, he argued the approach makes sense. “It’s perfectly rational for companies like Amazon to put together critical mass on both talent and compute right now,” Luan said.
Asked why he left Adept for Amazon, Luan explained that he didn’t want to steer the startup into becoming “an enterprise company that only sells small models.” Instead, he wanted to pursue “the four crucial remaining research problems left to AGI.”
Those breakthroughs, he added, will require enormous computing resources. “Every single one of them is going to require two-digit billion-dollar clusters to go run it,” Luan said. “How else am I … going to have the opportunity to go do that?”
