Amazon says that it’s establishing a new R&D lab in San Francisco, the Amazon AGI SF Lab, to focus on building “foundational” capabilities for AI agents.
The Amazon AGI SF Lab, which will be led by David Luan, the co-founder of AI startup Adept, will seek to build agents that can “take actions in the digital and physical worlds” and “handle complex workflows” using computers, web browsers, and code interpreters.
“Our work will build on that of Amazon’s broader AGI team,” reads a post jointly authored by Luan and Pieter Abbeel, a robotics research lead who joined Amazon by way of the company’s acquisition of AI robotics startup Covariant in August. An Amazon spokesperson tells TechCrunch that Abbeel will be working “closely” with Luan and the AGI SF Lab.
“Our initial focus is on several key research bets that will enable AI agents to perform real-world actions, learn from human feedback, self-course-correct, and infer our goals,” Luan and Abbeel added.
The lab will be seeded by Adept employees, and Amazon’s looking to hire a few “dozen” additional researchers in fields such as physics, math, and quantitative finance.
In June, Adept, which is developing AI-powered agents to complete software-based tasks, agreed to license its tech to Amazon, and Luan and Adept’s other co-founders, as well as portion’s of Adept’s team, joined the e-commerce giant. Luan was working under — and will continue to work under — Rohit Prasad, the former Alexa head who’s leading an AGI team focused on building large language models.
Amazon’s quasi-acquisition of Adept resembled the deal Microsoft struck with AI company Inflection in May. Both have come under regulatory scrutiny as policymakers seek to determine whether the tech giants are quashing their AI competition.
Adept was founded two years ago with the goal of creating an AI model that can perform actions on any software tool using natural language. At a high level, the vision was to create an “AI teammate” of sorts trained to use a wide variety of different software tools and APIs.
Many others now share this vision. According to Emergen Research, “agentic” AI could be worth $31 billion as a sector by the end of the year.
In addition to startups like Orby, Emergence, and Rabbit, OpenAI and other major AI players are developing agent products to complete tasks largely autonomous. OpenAI rival Anthropic earlier this year released its take on the tech, while Google is reportedly working on AI agents that can make purchases, such as booking flights and hotels.
Amazon has dabbled in the agent space, but has yet to make a serious play. In July, the company announced conversational agents for its Bedrock AI development platform, and just last week, it brought agents to its Amazon Q Business assistant platform for business customers and devs. Amazon CEO Andy Jassy has hinted at a more agentic Alexa, meanwhile — one capable of not only responding to questions but taking actions.
