Greg Bensinger and Crystal Hu
(Reuters) – Amazon.com has hired the co-founders of artificial intelligence startup Adept and some of its team members, in a move that echoes a move by rival Microsoft (NASDAQ:) as it tries to combat perceptions that it is catching up to its rivals. in AI.
In a blog post on Friday, Adept reported that co-founder and CEO David Luan, as well as several other co-founders and employees, are leaving to join Amazon (NASDAQ:).
The San Francisco startup, which has raised more than $410 million and is valued at more than $1 billion, has already appointed a new CEO and said it will continue to operate independently of Amazon.
The move is similar to that of Microsoft, which in March hired most of Inflection AI’s management and staff and agreed to pay a licensing fee of about $650 million.
The deal has drawn scrutiny from regulators, with the US Federal Trade Commission looking into whether the deal was an attempt to circumvent merger disclosure requirements, a person told Reuters earlier this month.
Amazon will pay Adept a licensing fee to use some of its technologies that help automate certain business functions. An Amazon spokesman declined to disclose terms of the non-exclusive deal.
Amazon is investing in training an ambitious large language model, Reuters reports, hoping it can compete with the best models of Microsoft-backed OpenAI and Alphabet (NASDAQ:). The new developments from Adept signal the tech giant’s commitment to working on artificial intelligence agent tools, which is what its core labs are focusing on.
Earlier this month, Reuters reported that Amazon is looking to update its Alexa voice assistant to fully integrate generative artificial intelligence, which can respond almost instantly in full sentences to complex prompts or queries.
An Amazon spokesperson said Adept employees have already joined the company and about 20 Adept employees remain with the startup. Adept did not respond to a request for comment.
At Amazon, Luan and several others will report to Rohit Prasad, who oversees artificial general intelligence, or AGI. Others will join the team developing devices and other services, according to an internal memo seen by Reuters.
Prasad, a former Alexa executive who now reports directly to Amazon CEO Andy Jassy, has tapped researchers working on Alexa AI and Amazon’s scientific team to work on learning models, bringing together artificial intelligence efforts at the company with dedicated resources.
Prasad said in the memo that these employees will “significantly assist us in our quest to achieve AGI.”
Adept has also held talks with other technology companies, including Meta (NASDAQ:), which have decided not to pursue a tie-up or partnership, people familiar with the matter told Reuters. Meta did not immediately respond to a request for comment.