When Amazon employed the founders of AI startup Adept final 12 months, it was one of many first examples of what grew to become often called a reverse acquihire — a deal the place a big firm hires key startup staff members and licenses its expertise, fairly than buying the startup outright.
Adept’s co-founder and former CEO David Luan subsequently grew to become the pinnacle of Amazon’s new AGI Lab, and whereas Luan’s current interview with The Verge is ostensibly centered on Amazon’s imaginative and prescient for AI brokers, reporter Alex Heath additionally requested him concerning the reverse acquihire pattern.
Luan replied that hopes to be “remembered extra as being an AI analysis innovator fairly than a deal construction innovator,” — however from his perspective, it’s “completely rational” for firms like Amazon to “put collectively crucial mass on each expertise and compute proper now.”
As for why he was prepared to go away his startup for Amazon, Luan mentioned he wasn’t concerned with turning Adept right into a “an enterprise firm that solely sells small fashions,” as a result of he needed to resolve “the 4 essential remaining analysis issues left to AGI.”
“Each single one in all them goes to require two-digit billion-dollar clusters to go run it,” he mentioned. “How else am I […] going to have the chance to go do this?”
