Amazon opens a new AI-agent R&D lab in San Francisco

Amazon has opened a new R&D lab in San Francisco to build "foundational" capabilities for AI agents. David Luan, co-founder and former CEO of AI startup Adept, will lead the project. 

Luan was the vice president of Engineering at OpenAI and spent a year as Director of Google Research. He founded Adept in 2022 before moving to Amazon as the head of the company's Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) SF lab. 

In June, Amazon hired Luan and co-founders Augustus Odena, Maxwell Nye, Erich Elsen, and Kelsey Szot as part of a broader deal that would give Amazon access to some of Adept's tech licenses. Adept raised $350 million in March 2023 in a Series B round on a $1 billion valuation. 

The AGI SF team will work closely with the broader research team to create AI agents that "can take actions in the digital and physical worlds." The team's initial focus would be making AI agents that can "perform real-world actions, learn from human feedback, self-course-correct, and infer our goals."