By Greg Bensinger and Crystal Ho
(Reuters) – Amazon.com Inc has hired the founders and some of its team members of artificial intelligence startup Adept, a move that mirrors rival Microsoft Corp (NASDAQ:MSFT.O), as it seeks to combat the perception that it is playing catch-up in AI.
Adept said in a blog post on Friday that co-founder and CEO David Luan, along with several other co-founders and employees, were leaving to join Amazon (NASDAQ: ).
The San Francisco-based startup, which has raised more than $410 million and is valued at more than $1 billion, has named a new CEO.
The move is similar to one Microsoft took in March, when the company hired a large number of Inflection AI leaders and employees and agreed to pay a licensing fee of about $650 million.
The deal has drawn regulatory scrutiny, with the Federal Trade Commission looking into whether the deal was a ploy to skirt merger disclosure requirements, one of the people told Reuters earlier this month.
Adept said it will continue to operate independently from Amazon. Amazon will pay Adept a licensing fee to use some of its technology, which helps automate business functions. An Amazon spokesperson declined to disclose terms of the non-exclusive deal.
Reuters reported that Amazon is investing in training a large, ambitious language model, in the hope that it can compete with leading models from OpenAI backed by Microsoft and Alphabet (NASDAQ:). The new additions from Adept signal the tech giant’s ambition to work on AI agent tools, an area major labs are focusing on.
Reuters reported earlier this month that Amazon is racing to update its Alexa voice assistant to fully integrate generative AI, which can respond almost instantly with full sentences to complex prompts or queries.
The Amazon spokesperson said that brilliant employees have already joined the company and there are still about 20 skilled workers at the startup. Adept did not respond to a request for comment.
At Amazon, Luan and several others will report to Rohit Prasad, who oversees artificial general intelligence, or AGI. Others will join the hardware development team and other services, according to an internal memo seen by Reuters.
Prasad, the former head of Alexa, who now reports directly to Amazon CEO Andy Jassy, brought in researchers working on Alexa’s AI and Amazon’s science team to work on the training models, unifying AI efforts across the company with dedicated resources.
The employees “will greatly assist us in our quest to achieve artificial general intelligence,” Prasad said in the memo.
Adept has also held discussions with other tech companies including Meta (NASDAQ: ), which has decided not to pursue any partnership or tie-up, people familiar with the matter told Reuters. Meta declined to comment.