Amazon opens a new laboratory to develop artificial intelligence agents

Amazon has announced the creation of the Amazon AGI SF Lab, a new research and development laboratory located in San Francisco. This project will focus on designing fundamental capabilities for artificial intelligence agents capable of performing actions in both the digital and physical worlds. David Luan, co-founder of the startup Adept, will lead the laboratory, which will develop tools to manage complex workflows using computers, browsers, and other code interpreters.

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“Our work will be based on Amazon’s broader AGI team,” explained Luan and Pieter Abbeel, a robotics researcher who joined Amazon after an agreement with Covariant, in a statement. Abbeel will work closely with Luan on the initial development of AI agents capable of performing real actions, learning from human feedback, self-correcting, and understanding objectives. The lab will have Adept employees as its foundation, and Amazon plans to hire several dozen researchers specializing in areas such as quantitative finance, physics, and mathematics.

Last June, Amazon reached an agreement with Adept to license its technology. This allowed Luan and part of his team to integrate into the e-commerce giant under the supervision of Rohit Prasad, former leader of Alexa, who now leads a general artificial intelligence team specializing in large language models.

Founded two years ago, Adept emerged with the goal of developing AI models capable of performing actions in any software tool through natural language. According to Luan, their vision was to create a versatile “AI companion” that could handle various applications. This concept of agentic AI has been gaining great popularity, and a report from Emergen Research estimates that the sector will reach a value of 31 billion dollars by the end of the year.

Although OpenAI, Google, and other major tech companies are working on similar developments, Amazon has shown great interest in AI over the past year. Recently, it announced conversational agents for Bedrock AI and added similar features to its Amazon Q Business platform. Additionally, Andy Jassy, CEO of Amazon, hinted that Alexa could evolve towards a more “agent” approach, combining responses with action capability.

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