When Amazonhired the founders of AI startup Adeptlast year, it was one of the first examples of what became known as reverse acquihires — deals where a large company hires key startup team members and licenses its technology, rather than acquiring the startup outright.
Adept’s co-founder and former CEO David Luan subsequently becamethe head of Amazon’s new AGI Lab, and whileLuan’s recent interviewwith The Verge is ostensibly focused on Amazon’s vision for AI agents, reporter Alex Heath also asked him aboutthe reverse acquihire trend.
“So I hope, in 50 years, I’m remembered more as being an AI research innovator rather than a deal structure innovator,” Luan said. But from his perspective, it’s “perfectly rational” for companies like Amazon to “put together critical mass on both talent and compute right now.”
As for why he was willing to leave his startup for Amazon, Luan said he wasn’t interested in turning Adept into a “an enterprise company that only sells small models” — he wanted to solve “the four crucial remaining research problems left to AGI.”
“Every single one of them is going to require two-digit billion-dollar clusters to go run it,” he said. “How else am I […] going to have the opportunity to go do that?”
Source: Techcrunch
