When Amazon employed the founders of AI startup Adept final yr, it was one of many first examples of what grew to become often called a reverse acquihire — a deal the place a big firm hires key startup workforce members and licenses its expertise, reasonably than buying the startup outright.
Adept’s co-founder and former CEO David Luan subsequently grew to become the top of Amazon’s new AGI Lab, and whereas Luan’s current 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 reasonably than a deal construction innovator,” — however from his perspective, it’s “completely rational” for firms like Amazon to “put collectively important mass on each expertise and compute proper now.”
As for why he was keen to depart his startup for Amazon, Luan mentioned he wasn’t keen on turning Adept right into a “an enterprise firm that solely sells small fashions,” as a result of he wished to unravel “the 4 essential remaining analysis issues left to AGI.”
“Each single certainly one of them goes to require two-digit billion-dollar clusters to go run it,” he mentioned. “How else am I […] going to have the chance to go try this?”