When Amazon hired the founders of AI startup Adept last year, it marked one of the first instances of a reverse acquihire—a scenario where a large company hires key members of a startup and licenses its technology instead of acquiring the entire company.
Adept’s co-founder and former CEO David Luan later took on the role as head of Amazon’s new AGI Lab. While his recent interview with The Verge mainly focused on Amazon’s AI agent initiatives, reporter Alex Heath also discussed the reverse acquihire trend with him.
Luan mentioned he hopes to be remembered more as an AI research innovator than a deal structure innovator. From his perspective, it’s logical for companies like Amazon to consolidate both talent and computing resources at this time.
Regarding his decision to leave the startup for Amazon, Luan explained he was not interested in transforming Adept into an enterprise that only sells small models; he aimed to address the “four crucial remaining research problems left to AGI.”
“Each of these problems will need clusters costing tens of billions to tackle,” he stated. “Where else would I […] get the chance to pursue this?”