Amazon.com, trying to dispel the notion that it is lagging behind rival Microsoft in the AI space, recruited away the co-founders and a portion of the staff of artificial intelligence firm Adept.

In a blog post on Friday, Adept announced that CEO and co-founder David Luan, along with a number of other co-founders and staff members, were joining Amazon.

The San Francisco-based business, valued at over $1 billion and having raised over $410 million, has already appointed a new chief executive officer.

Similar actions were taken by Microsoft, which agreed to pay a licencing fee of around $650 million and took away a significant portion of Inflection AI’s leadership and staff in March.

The transaction has drawn regulatory attention; according to a source who spoke with Reuters earlier this month, the Federal Trade Commission is investigating whether the purchase was an attempt to evade merger disclosure laws.

Adept declared that it will carry on running without interference from Amazon. Adept’s technology may be used by Amazon for a licence fee; this helps automate business processes. The specifics of the non-exclusive agreement were not disclosed by an Amazon representative.

According to Reuters, Amazon is investing in the training of an ambitious huge language model in the hopes of competing with top models from Alphabet and Microsoft-backed OpenAI. The computer giant’s goal to work on AI agents tools, an area key laboratories are focused on, is signalled by the new Adept hires.

Earlier this month, there were rumours that Amazon was working quickly to update its voice assistant Alexa to fully incorporate generative AI, which can react to complex cues or requests nearly instantly with whole phrases.

According to an Amazon representative, 20 or so Adept employees are still employed with the business. The Adept staff have already joined the company. A request for comment from Adept was not answered.

Luan will be reporting to Rohit Prasad, the head of artificial general intelligence, or AGI, at Amazon, along with many other employees. According to an internal document that was leaked to the public, more people will be joining the team that develops gadgets and other services.

In order order to unify AI efforts throughout the firm with specialised resources, Prasad, the former head of Alexa and current direct report to Amazon CEO Andy Jassy, brought together researchers working on Alexa AI and the Amazon science team to collaborate on training models.

The new jobs, according to Prasad’s message, “will significantly help us on our quest to achieving AGI.”

Adept also had talks with other tech firms, such as Meta, who declined to pursue a joint venture or partnership, according to people with knowledge of the situation. Meta made no remarks on the matter.

(Adapted from USNews.com)

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