{"id":92996,"date":"2025-08-24T06:47:06","date_gmt":"2025-08-24T06:47:06","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/92996\/"},"modified":"2025-08-24T06:47:06","modified_gmt":"2025-08-24T06:47:06","slug":"amazon-agi-labs-chief-defends-his-reverse-acquihire","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/92996\/","title":{"rendered":"Amazon AGI Labs chief defends his reverse acquihire"},"content":{"rendered":"

When Amazon hired the founders of AI startup Adept<\/a> last year, it was one of the first examples of what became known as a reverse acquihire \u2014 a deal where a large company hires key startup team members and licenses its technology, rather than acquiring the startup outright.<\/p>\n

Adept\u2019s co-founder and former CEO David Luan subsequently became the head of Amazon\u2019s new\u00a0AGI Lab<\/a>, and while Luan\u2019s recent interview<\/a> with The Verge is ostensibly focused on Amazon\u2019s vision for AI agents, reporter Alex Heath also asked him about the reverse acquihire trend<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Luan replied that hopes to be \u201cremembered more as being an AI research innovator rather than a deal structure innovator,\u201d \u2014 but from his perspective, it\u2019s \u201cperfectly rational\u201d for companies like Amazon to \u201cput together critical mass on both talent and compute right now.\u201d<\/p>\n

As for why he was willing to leave his startup for Amazon, Luan said he wasn\u2019t interested in turning Adept into a \u201can enterprise company that only sells small models,\u201d because he wanted to solve \u201cthe four crucial remaining research problems left to AGI.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cEvery single one of them is going to require two-digit billion-dollar clusters to go run it,\u201d he said. \u201cHow else am I [\u2026] going to have the opportunity to go do that?\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"When Amazon hired the founders of AI startup Adept last year, it was one of the first examples…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":92997,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[54570,62,276,277,49,48,54571,54572,61],"class_list":["post-92996","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-artificial-intelligence","tag-adept","tag-ai","tag-artificial-intelligence","tag-artificialintelligence","tag-ca","tag-canada","tag-david-luan","tag-reverse-acquihire","tag-technology"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/92996","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=92996"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/92996\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/92997"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=92996"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=92996"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=92996"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}