On June 29th, Caijing reported that in the technology industry, a battle for artificial intelligence (AI) talent is heating up, and US technology giant Amazon is currently trying to increase its development efforts in AI technology. According to the latest developments, the company has reached an agreement with the AI start-up Adept to hire top talent from Adept and acquire its technology.

Adept is a start-up that focuses on developing AI-driven "agents" that can perform various software-based tasks. Currently, the company has agreed to license its technology to Amazon, and the co-founder and some of the team have also joined the e-commerce giant.

Last Friday (June 28th), Rohit Prasad, the senior vice president and chief scientist in charge of Amazon's General Artificial Intelligence (AGI) department, wrote in a memo to employees, "Amazon has hired Adept co-founder and CEO David Luan and several other talented team members to join our AGI team." AGI is a more advanced technology than the current generative AI, and has capabilities close to human level.

It is reported that Luan will be responsible for Amazon's AGI Autonomous department and will report directly to Prasad. Prasad is also a leading talent in the field, having served as chief scientist for Amazon's voice assistant Alexa, and was appointed to lead Amazon's AGI development in August last year.

Subsequently, Adept also confirmed the move in a blog post. The company said that developing its own AI model would require more funding and that the deal with Amazon would allow it to focus on building AI agents. Additionally, it is worth noting that after Luan and other executives joined Amazon, Adept will continue to operate as an independent company.

Similar to the Amazon-Adept cooperation is the hiring action of Microsoft. In March of this year, Microsoft hired Mustafa Suleyman, who was a co-founder of Google DeepMind and later led the start-up Inflection AI. Subsequently, Microsoft also invited several high-level executives from Inflection and granted authorization for some of its technology.

Crowded market

Adept was founded two years ago with the aim of creating an AI model that can perform operations on any software tool using natural language. At a higher level, the company hopes to create an "AI teammate" that trains them to use a variety of different software tools and APIs, a vision that coincides with companies such as OpenAI, Rabbit, and others.

Adept has won many supporters, including Nvidia, Atlassian, Workday, and Greylock, with its technology and has raised more than $415 million in funding, with a valuation reaching around $1 billion at one point.

However, the start-up has been plagued by product malfunctions, and despite months of testing, it has struggled to push any products onto the market, resulting in the departure of two co-founders, Ashish Vaswani and Niki Parmar.

In the past few months, there have been reports that Adept has been in talks with Meta and Microsoft about potential acquisitions. Microsoft has invested in this start-up before, but no acquisition or partnership deal has been announced as of yet.

The potential reason is that the market for AI agents is more crowded today than when Adept was founded, with well-funded start-ups such as Orby and Emergence competing for this potentially profitable market. According to market research firm Grand View Research, the value of the AI agent market is expected to reach $4.2 billion by 2022.

Perhaps this collaboration between Adept and Amazon can help Adept successfully cross the finish line, and this transaction provides a lifeline for Adept.

Amazon increases investment and use

For Amazon itself, it also faces fierce competition in the field of AI.

Competitors Microsoft and Google have efficiently added new features to their core products and provided more ways for enterprises to access large language models in their public cloud offerings. Although Amazon's cloud computing division has also launched a series of AI services, including its own large model, these services are generally considered lagging behind their rivals.

Faced with this situation, Amazon is increasing its investment and use of generative AI. Amazon has invested billions of dollars in OpenAI's competitor Anthropic and plans to completely revamp its Alexa voice assistant by adding generative AI functionality.

Amazon pointed out that due to investment in technical infrastructure (especially generative AI), this year's cash capital expenditure is expected to increase significantly. The company's first quarter cash capital expenditure was $13.9 billion, a year-on-year increase of 6%.

In terms of AI applications, it was reported that the entire finance team at Amazon is currently using generative AI, which can assist financial personnel in more complex analysis. Many Amazon executives said that their finance team will use generative AI technology in areas such as fraud detection, contract review, financial estimates, personal productivity, rules and regulation interpretations, and tax-related work, partly to reduce costs, improve efficiency, and accuracy.