One of the hottest topics in AI right now is agents—the idea that AI will evolve from chatbots into systems that can reliably complete tasks in the real world. The challenge is that, at present, agents aren’t particularly reliable.
There’s a lot of work underway in the AI industry to address this, which brings me to my guest today: David Luan, head of Amazon’s AGI research lab. I’ve been eager to speak with David for a long time. He was an early research leader at OpenAI, contributing to GPT-2, GPT-3, and DALL-E. After OpenAI, he co-founded Adept, an AI research lab focused on agents. Last summer, he left Adept to join Amazon, where he now leads the company’s AGI lab in San Francisco.
I also had to ask him about his move to Amazon. David’s decision to leave Adept is one of the early examples of what I call a “reverse acquihire,” where a major tech company essentially acquires a hot AI startup without triggering antitrust concerns. I won’t give too much away, but David’s move from the startup world to Big Tech was motivated by his sense of where the AI race was heading. That perspective makes his predictions about the future of AI particularly compelling.
If you want, I can also make an even snappier, punchy version that’s more suitable for a newsletter or blog intro. Do you want me to do that?
