Head of Amazon’s AGI lab is leaving the company

The head of Amazon’s artificial general intelligence lab is leaving the company less than two years after joining through a so-called acqui-hire deal of his startup Adept.

David Luan announced his departure Tuesday in a LinkedIn post, saying he will exit at the end of the week “to cook up something new.”

Amazon tapped Luan in December 2024 to oversee its newly created AGI lab, based in San Francisco. The lab is focused on “long-term research bets,” including developing “useful AI agents.” Last year, the group released Amazon’s Nova frontier model, which the company hopes will compete with leading AI models like OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Anthropic’s Claude and Google’s Gemini.

“There’s incredible work to be done at Amazon and opportunities for me to take on more areas,” Luan wrote. “But with AGI so close, I decided to spend 100% of my time on teaching AI systems brand new capabilities.”

Luan’s departure comes after Amazon announced a major reorganization of its AGI division late last year, bringing it under Peter DeSantis, a 27-year veteran of the company and a senior vice president in its cloud unit. AGI refers to artificial intelligence that can perform as well or better than humans on most tasks.

Amazon in June 2024 hired Luan and other top executives from Adept. It also licensed technology from Adept, including some of its AI models and datasets. The deal size was not disclosed.

Federal Trade Commission Chairman Andrew Ferguson in January said his agency would review these AI acqui-hire deals to learn whether tech companies are attempting to evade regulatory reviews. The agency in 2024 opened a probe into Amazon’s hiring of Adept employees. AI acqui-hire deals have also come under scrutiny from lawmakers, including Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass.

Amazon representatives declined to comment.

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