Amazon AGI Labs chief defends his reverse acqui-hire

When Amazon hired the founders of AI startup Adept last year, it was one of the first examples of what became known as a reverse acqui-hire — a deal 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 became the head of Amazon’s new AGI Lab, and while Luan’s recent interview with The Verge is ostensibly focused on Amazon’s vision for AI agents, reporter Alex Heath also asked him about the reverse acqui-hire trend.

Luan replied that he hopes to be “remembered more as being an AI research innovator rather than a deal structure innovator” — 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 “an enterprise company that only sells small models,” because 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?”