When Amazon employed the founders of AI startup Adept final yr, it was one of many first examples of what grew to become generally known as a reverse acquihire — a deal the place a big firm hires key startup workforce members and licenses its know-how, relatively 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 latest interview with The Verge is ostensibly targeted on Amazon’s imaginative and prescient for AI brokers, reporter Alex Heath additionally requested him about the reverse acquihire pattern.
Luan replied that hopes to be “remembered extra as being an AI analysis innovator relatively than a deal construction innovator,” — however from his perspective, it’s “completely rational” for corporations like Amazon to “put collectively essential mass on each expertise and compute proper now.”
As for why he was prepared to depart his startup for Amazon, Luan stated he wasn’t excited by 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 every of them goes to require two-digit billion-dollar clusters to go run it,” he stated. “How else am I […] going to have the chance to go try this?”
