\n<\/p>\n
When Amazon hired the founders of AI startup Adept<\/a> last year, it was one of the first examples of what became known as a reverse acquihire \u2014 a deal where a large company hires key startup team members and licenses its technology, rather than acquiring the startup outright.<\/p>\n Adept\u2019s co-founder and former CEO David Luan subsequently became the head of Amazon\u2019s new\u00a0AGI Lab<\/a>, and while Luan\u2019s recent interview<\/a> with The Verge is ostensibly focused on Amazon\u2019s vision for AI agents, reporter Alex Heath also asked him about the reverse acquihire trend<\/a>.<\/p>\n Luan replied that hopes to be \u201cremembered more as being an AI research innovator rather than a deal structure innovator,\u201d \u2014 but from his perspective, it\u2019s \u201cperfectly rational\u201d for companies like Amazon to \u201cput together critical mass on both talent and compute right now.\u201d<\/p>\n As for why he was willing to leave his startup for Amazon, Luan said he wasn\u2019t interested in turning Adept into a \u201can enterprise company that only sells small models,\u201d because he wanted to solve \u201cthe four crucial remaining research problems left to AGI.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cEvery single one of them is going to require two-digit billion-dollar clusters to go run it,\u201d he said. \u201cHow else am I [\u2026] going to have the opportunity to go do that?\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n