Adept AI was founded in 2022 by David Luan (former VP of Engineering at OpenAI), along with other prominent researchers. The company focused on building AI agents that could use software tools and take actions on behalf of users, a vision that was ahead of its time. In 2024, Amazon hired most of Adept’s team in a deal structured similarly to Microsoft’s Inflection acquisition.
Core Products
ACT-1 (Action Transformer) was Adept’s flagship model, designed to observe and interact with software interfaces. Unlike language-only models, ACT-1 was trained to understand screenshots, click buttons, fill forms, and navigate applications. Fuyu was a fast multimodal model optimized for understanding visual interfaces. Adept Experiments provided early access to agent capabilities.
Competitive Position
Adept was among the first companies to seriously pursue AI agents that could use computers like humans do. This vision has since been validated by Claude’s computer use capabilities, OpenAI’s operator efforts, and Cognition’s Devin. However, Adept struggled to achieve reliable enough performance for production deployment, and the team ultimately joined Amazon rather than continuing independently.
Recent Developments
Amazon hired Adept’s co-founders and most of its technical team in 2024, paying approximately $650 million in a licensing deal structured to avoid FTC acquisition scrutiny. The technology and team are now integrated into Amazon’s AI efforts, particularly around Alexa and agent-based systems. A small team remains at the independent entity.
Outlook
Like Inflection, Adept’s acquisition reflects the extreme difficulty of building a frontier AI company independently. The agent-first thesis was correct but premature, and the capital required to execute it exceeded what a startup could sustain. Adept’s technology likely lives on within Amazon’s products, but the independent company is effectively wound down.