“An Update to Adept [Amazon Acquihire]”, 2024-06-28 (; backlinks):
Our mission at Adept since we started two-and-a-half years ago has been to build useful general intelligence that enables people and computers to work together. Our plan has been to train progressively larger and smarter multimodal foundation models, fine-tune them into Agents, and then build products around them that help people do their day-to-day work better…From our conversations with existing beta customers and prospects, it’s clear that there is tremendous potential and intense interest in the technology we’re building.
Continuing with Adept’s initial plan of building both useful general intelligence and an enterprise agent product would’ve required spending substantial attention on fundraising for our foundation models, rather than bringing to life our agent vision. Therefore, to focus on maintaining the strong momentum and potential of our agent tech stack, we are announcing some updates to our strategy and the company.
Adept will now focus entirely on solutions that enable agentic AI, which will continue to be powered by a combination of our existing state-of-the-art in-house models, agentic data, web interaction software, and custom infrastructure. We look forward to continuing towards this vision and working with partners to bring agentic capabilities to their products and tools.
In addition, the Adept co-founders and some of the team are joining Amazon’s AGI organization to continue to pursue the mission of building useful general intelligence. Amazon is also licensing Adept’s agent technology, family of state-of-the-art multimodal models, and a few datasets.
[Translation: Adept’s software was working, but the continued scale-up of base models into billion-dollar-plus training runs meant that soon the frontier labs would destroy Adept, and Adept can’t raise that much money, and so they are being acquihired by Amazon in a deniable fashion to avoid antitrust regulator scrutiny of the sort Microsoft & OpenAI are now.]