Amazon AGI Labs Chief Defends Reverse Acqui-Hire Strategy

The Rise of Reverse Acqui-Hires in AI

Last year, Amazon’s recruitment of the founding team from the AI startup Adept marked a notable instance of what would later be termed a reverse acqui-hire.

This type of deal involves a larger corporation onboarding key personnel from a startup and securing licensing rights to its technology, instead of a full acquisition.

David Luan's Transition to Amazon

Following the move, Adept’s co-founder and previous CEO, David Luan, assumed leadership of Amazon’s newly established AGI Lab.

During a recent interview with The Verge, Luan primarily discussed Amazon’s AI agent strategy, but also addressed the growing trend of reverse acqui-hires when questioned by reporter Alex Heath.

Rationalizing the Deal Structure

Luan expressed a desire to be recognized primarily for his contributions to AI research, rather than the specifics of the deal itself.

However, he asserted that it is “perfectly rational” for companies such as Amazon to rapidly accumulate both skilled personnel and substantial computational resources at this juncture.

The Appeal of Amazon's Resources

Luan explained his decision to join Amazon stemmed from a desire to tackle fundamental AGI research challenges.

He indicated that he wasn’t interested in scaling Adept into a company focused solely on selling smaller AI models.

The Need for Massive Compute Power

According to Luan, resolving the remaining critical research problems in the pursuit of AGI will necessitate access to immense computing infrastructure.

He stated that each challenge will likely require clusters costing in the tens of billions of dollars to operate effectively.

“How else am I going to have the opportunity to go do that?” he posed, highlighting the scale of resources available at Amazon.