Amazon’s AGI lab head quits in latest exit from high-end Adept first deal – GeekWire
David Luan, who led Amazon’s AGI Lab in San Francisco and oversees one of its most important AI programs, is leaving less than two years after joining the tech giant in a hiring deal that involves him and other leaders from AI startup Adept.
Luan announced her departure Tuesday in a LinkedIn post, saying she would be leaving at the end of the week “to cook something new.”
“There is amazing work to be done at Amazon and opportunities for me to take many places. But since AGI is around the corner, I have decided to spend 100% of my time on teaching new AI programming skills,” Luan wrote, adding later, “I have a bet on what’s next.”
With his departure, four of the five Adept founders who joined Amazon as part of the 2024 senior plan have left the company, a review of LinkedIn profiles shows.
Peter DeSantis, a 27-year Amazon veteran and senior vice president overseeing the company’s chips and quantum computing efforts, late last year took over a broader organization that included the AGI group, responsible for Amazon’s Nova Act AI technology. Luan wrote that the team “will be in good hands” with DeSantis.
Adept founder Kelsey Szot remains at the company in the AGI group, and Bryan Silverthorn, director of applied science who also joined Amazon from Adept, continues to lead the agent training research in the AGI group, his LinkedIn profile shows.
Amazon declined to comment beyond Luan’s post.
The arrangement between Amazon and Adept is one of the acquisition agreements that have drawn scrutiny from the Federal Trade Commission in recent years amid concerns that the tech giants are using agencies to acquire AI startups without triggering a formal review of the merger.
Under the deal, Amazon hired Luan and other Adept leaders, and licensed the startup’s agent technology and AI models, while Adept continued to operate independently with its remaining employees. The FTC reportedly reviewed the Amazon-Adept deal in 2024.
At Amazon, Luan served as vice president of Autonomy and led the AGI Lab, which was officially established in December 2024 as a small, research-focused group. Its first major release was Nova Act, an AI model and developer toolkit for building agents that can automate tasks in web browsers, which Amazon launched in March 2025.
“We think agents are the last missing piece on the road to intelligence,” Luan told GeekWire in an interview before the Nova Act was introduced.
In his post on Tuesday, Luan said that Nova Act has been accepted by customers including Hertz, 1Password, and Amazon.com itself, and has reached the top of REALBench’s agent research leaderboard. The model is often available as an AWS service at the Amazon re:Invent conference in December.
Other Adept founders who left Amazon scattered across the industry. Erich Elsen left after four months and is now the principal research scientist at Databricks. Augustus Odena and Maxwell Nye both left after about a year and are now research scientists at Meta.
Before founding Adept in 2022, Luan ran research and engineering at OpenAI for three years and led Google’s major language modeling effort. In his departure post, he described his work as a series of early bets, including installing OpenAI’s first GPTs, and entering Adept agents ahead of others.
He said Adept’s technology and people “are now driving computing efforts in every major lab.”
Amazon has separately invested up to $8 billion in Anthropic and offers third-party AI models alongside its Nova family through AWS, competing against cloud rivals Microsoft, Google, and others.
