Amazon AGI Labs Head Advocates for Reverse Acquihire Approach

Last year, Amazon’s acquisition of the founders of the AI startup Adept was one of the first notable instances of what is now known as a reverse acquihire. This term describes a scenario where a large corporation hires essential members of a startup’s team and licenses their technology instead of purchasing the startup outright.

David Luan, co-founder and former CEO of Adept, now heads Amazon’s new AGI Lab. In a recent interview with The Verge, while much of the dialogue focused on Amazon’s aspirations in AI, journalist Alex Heath also delved into the idea of reverse acquihires.

Luan conveyed his wish to be seen more as a pioneer in AI research than as a specialist in deal structures, underscoring that it’s “perfectly rational” for major corporations like Amazon to “gather a critical mass of both talent and computational resources at this time.”

Reflecting on his move from Adept to Amazon, Luan mentioned that he wasn’t interested in steering Adept towards becoming “an enterprise company that simply sells smaller models.” Instead, he aimed to address “the four significant research challenges that remain for AGI.”

“Each of these challenges will require clusters worth tens of billions to solve,” he pointed out. “How else am I […] going to get the chance to pursue that?”