# Adept AI

> Source: https://aiwiki.ai/wiki/adept_ai
> Updated: 2026-06-23
> Categories: AI Agents, AI Companies, Large Language Models
> From AI Wiki (https://aiwiki.ai), a free encyclopedia of artificial intelligence. Quote with attribution.

**Adept AI** (also known as Adept AI Labs) is an American [artificial intelligence](/wiki/artificial_intelligence) company, founded on January 5, 2022 in San Francisco, that pioneered "action models": [AI agents](/wiki/ai_agent) trained to operate existing software the way a human does, through clicks, keystrokes, and scrolling. It was co-founded by David Luan (CEO, former VP of Engineering at [OpenAI](/wiki/openai)), Ashish Vaswani, and Niki Parmar, with Vaswani and Parmar being two of the eight co-authors of the landmark 2017 paper "[Attention Is All You Need](/wiki/attention)," which introduced the [transformer](/wiki/transformer) architecture that underpins virtually all modern [large language models](/wiki/large_language_model). Additional co-founders included Augustus Odena, Maxwell Nye, Erich Elsen, Anmol Gulati, Fred Bertsch, and Kelsey Szot [1][2].

Adept raised approximately $415 million across two rounds and reached a valuation of about $1 billion before its trajectory shifted in June 2024, when [Amazon](/wiki/amazon) hired CEO David Luan and a majority of Adept's staff into its artificial general intelligence (AGI) division and licensed Adept's technology in a "reverse acqui-hire" that drew U.S. Federal Trade Commission (FTC) scrutiny [3][4][5][6]. Adept described its founding goal as building "useful general intelligence," framing ACT-1 as "a foundation model that can use every software tool, API and website that exists" [9]. The remaining company, with about 20 employees, continues under CEO Zach Brock [25][26].

## History

### When was Adept AI founded?

Adept AI emerged from stealth on April 26, 2022, announcing $65 million in Series A funding led by Greylock and Addition. The founding team brought together researchers from some of the most prominent AI organizations in the world. David Luan had served as VP of Engineering at OpenAI from 2017 to 2020, where he helped build and ship [GPT-2](/wiki/gpt-2), [GPT-3](/wiki/gpt-3), [CLIP](/wiki/clip), and [DALL-E](/wiki/dall-e). After leaving OpenAI, Luan spent roughly 15 months as a Director at [Google Brain](/wiki/google_brain), leading large-scale model training efforts. Ashish Vaswani and Niki Parmar were both former Google Brain researchers who had been instrumental in developing the transformer architecture [7][8].

The company's founding thesis was that the most impactful near-term application of AI would not be generating text or images but rather teaching AI to use existing software tools. Adept described this as building "useful general intelligence" in the form of a system that could do anything a human can do in front of a computer. The Series A round attracted notable angel investors including [Andrej Karpathy](/wiki/andrej_karpathy) (then head of Tesla Autopilot), Dara Khosrowshahi (CEO of Uber), Scott Belsky (founder of Behance), and Howie Liu (founder of Airtable) [7][9].

### What was ACT-1? (September 2022)

On September 14, 2022, Adept publicly demonstrated its first model, the Action Transformer (ACT-1). This was a large-scale [transformer](/wiki/transformer) model trained to use digital tools, connected to a Chrome browser extension that allowed it to observe what was happening on screen and take actions such as clicking, typing, and scrolling [9].

The ACT-1 demo showed the model performing a range of tasks that required understanding user intent and interacting with web applications. In one widely cited example, a user typed a natural language instruction and ACT-1 navigated a real estate website to find a home for a family of four in Houston with a budget of up to $600,000, entering search criteria, applying filters, and browsing listings. In another demonstration, ACT-1 worked within spreadsheet software to manipulate data based on high-level instructions. The model demonstrated the ability to compose multiple tools together, look up information it did not know, and correct its own mistakes after a single piece of human feedback [9][10].

ACT-1 attracted significant attention in the AI community because it represented a different direction from the chatbot-focused approaches of most AI startups at the time. Rather than generating text responses, ACT-1 was designed to take real actions in real software environments. Adept framed it as "a foundation model that can use every software tool, API and website that exists," positioning the system as a step toward what the company called "useful general intelligence" [9].

### Co-Founder Departures and Essential AI (2023)

In 2023, co-founders Ashish Vaswani and Niki Parmar departed Adept to launch a new startup called [Essential AI](/wiki/essential_ai). Essential AI focused on building enterprise software powered by large language models and went on to raise $64.5 million from investors including Thrive Capital, [Google](/wiki/google), Franklin Templeton Investments, and [NVIDIA](/wiki/nvidia). The departure of two of Adept's most high-profile co-founders, both credited as inventors of the transformer architecture, was a notable setback for the company. However, Adept continued to operate under Luan's leadership with the remaining co-founders and engineering team [11][12].

### Series B Funding (March 2023)

On March 14, 2023, Adept announced a $350 million Series B funding round co-led by General Catalyst and Spark Capital. The round valued the company at approximately $1 billion, granting it unicorn status. Additional investors included Addition, Greylock, Atlassian Ventures, [Microsoft](/wiki/microsoft), NVIDIA, Workday Ventures, Frontiers Capital, PSP Growth, SV Angel, A.Capital, and Caterina Fake. This brought Adept's total funding to approximately $415 million [3][4][13].

The Series B reflected enormous investor enthusiasm for AI agent technology at a time when [ChatGPT](/wiki/chatgpt) had recently launched and venture capital was flooding into AI startups. Adept's pitch was differentiated: rather than building another chatbot or language model for text generation, the company was training models to automate knowledge work by directly operating enterprise software [13].

### Persimmon-8B (September 2023)

On September 7, 2023, Adept open-sourced Persimmon-8B, a text-only language model with approximately 9.3 billion parameters. At the time of its release, Adept described it as the most powerful fully permissively-licensed language model under 10 billion parameters. Key features of Persimmon-8B included [14][15]:

- A 16,384-token context window (four times that of [LLaMA 2](/wiki/llama) and eight times that of [GPT-3](/wiki/gpt-3))
- Performance comparable to [LLaMA](/wiki/llama) 2 despite being trained on only 37% as much data
- An Apache 2.0 open-source license, making it fully permissive for commercial use
- Custom high-speed inference code matching the performance of optimized C++ implementations while retaining [PyTorch](/wiki/pytorch) flexibility

The model used a standard decoder-only transformer architecture with several modifications, including the squared [ReLU](/wiki/relu) activation function, rotary positional encodings, and layer normalization applied to the Q and K embeddings before the [attention](/wiki/attention) calculation [14].

### What is Fuyu-8B? (October 2023)

On October 17, 2023, Adept released Fuyu-8B, an open-source [multimodal](/wiki/multimodal_ai) model with approximately 8 billion parameters, designed from the ground up for digital agents. Unlike most multimodal models at the time, Fuyu-8B used a simplified architecture: a vanilla decoder-only transformer with no specialized image encoder. Image patches were linearly projected directly into the first layer of the transformer, bypassing the embedding lookup entirely [16][17].

This architectural simplicity gave Fuyu-8B several practical advantages. It could support arbitrary image resolutions without preprocessing or resizing. It could process large images and return responses in under 100 milliseconds. And it was straightforward to scale, train, and deploy compared to architectures that relied on separate vision encoders [16].

Fuyu-8B was released under a CC-BY-NC (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial) license and was made available on [Hugging Face](/wiki/hugging_face). The model demonstrated strong performance on visual question-answering and natural image captioning benchmarks, and it was specifically optimized for understanding user interfaces, answering questions about graphs and diagrams, and performing fine-grained localization on screen images [16][17].

### Fuyu-Heavy (January 2024)

In late January 2024, Adept announced Fuyu-Heavy, a larger multimodal model in the Fuyu family. The company described Fuyu-Heavy as the world's third-most-capable multimodal model at the time, behind only [GPT-4V](/wiki/gpt-4) and [Gemini](/wiki/gemini) Ultra, which were estimated to be 10 to 20 times larger. On the [MMMU](/wiki/mmmu) (Massive Multi-discipline Multimodal Understanding) benchmark, Fuyu-Heavy scored higher than Gemini Pro. On standard text-only evaluations, it performed roughly on par with Gemini Pro and outperformed it on the [MMLU](/wiki/mmlu) benchmark. In chat evaluation, it performed comparably to [Claude](/wiki/claude) 2.0 [18][19].

Fuyu-Heavy was not open-sourced. Instead, it served as the foundation for Adept's internal product development and was later used in the ACT-2 model that powered Adept's enterprise workflow automation tools [18].

### Adept Experiments and Enterprise Product

Adept launched a product initiative called "Adept Experiments," with Workflows as its first offering. Workflows was powered by ACT-2, a multimodal model fine-tuned from the Fuyu family and optimized for UI understanding, knowledge worker data comprehension, and action execution. The system worked as an end-to-end multimodal AI agent that perceived the screen directly via pixels and acted on the computer through coordinates and keystrokes [20][21].

Adept began working with enterprise customers, demonstrating the ability to learn new workflows in minutes and execute complex multi-step tasks across multiple software applications. The company reported over 95% reliability for workflows developed in direct collaboration with enterprise clients. Use cases included hiring process automation, document extraction, database updates, and multi-application data workflows [20][21].

## Why did Amazon hire Adept's team? (June 2024)

On June 28, 2024, Amazon announced that it had hired David Luan and several other Adept co-founders, including Augustus Odena, Maxwell Nye, Erich Elsen, and Kelsey Szot, to join its AGI team led by Rohit Prasad. As part of the arrangement, Amazon obtained a non-exclusive license to Adept's technology, which Amazon characterized as "Adept's agent technology, family of state-of-the-art multimodal models, and a few datasets" intended to "accelerate our roadmap for building digital agents that can automate software workflows" [5][22][23].

The deal was not structured as a traditional acquisition. Amazon stated that it did not consider the arrangement an acquisition because it was not interested in owning Adept's business and technology outright. Instead, approximately two-thirds of Adept's roughly 100 employees joined Amazon, while about 20 employees remained at Adept. According to reporting by Semafor, Adept itself received around $25 million from the arrangement [5][6][24].

### How much did Adept's investors recoup?

The deal had significant implications for Adept's investors. Firms including Greylock and General Catalyst had collectively invested about $414 million in the company. According to reporting by Semafor, the co-founders arranged for investors to roughly recoup their investment using funds paid by Amazon; Amazon did not pay investors directly and did not buy Adept. Investors received approximately their money back rather than the substantial returns they had expected from a billion-dollar AI company. For venture capital firms that had entered at the Series B valuation, getting their money back represented a significant disappointment compared to the typical expectations for a unicorn investment [24].

Adept retained about one-third of its workforce and approximately $25 million in operating capital. Zach Brock, previously Adept's Head of Engineering, took over as CEO. Tim Weingarten remained as Head of Product. The reconstituted company shifted its focus to enabling agentic AI solutions, working with partners to bring agentic capabilities to their products rather than spending resources on training expensive foundation models [25][26].

### Why did the FTC investigate the Amazon-Adept deal?

The Amazon-Adept deal attracted scrutiny from the U.S. Federal Trade Commission (FTC), which launched an informal inquiry into the arrangement in July 2024. The FTC sent a list of questions to Amazon seeking details about its relationship with Adept. Regulators were examining whether the mass hiring effectively amounted to an acquisition of Adept that circumvented merger notification rules under the Hart-Scott-Rodino (HSR) Act, since the startup's ownership remained unchanged [6][27].

The investigation was part of a broader FTC effort to scrutinize so-called "reverse acqui-hires" in the AI sector. Similar deals were also under review, including Microsoft's March 2024 arrangement with [Inflection AI](/wiki/inflection_ai), in which Microsoft paid $650 million to license Inflection's technology and hired most of its 70-person workforce, including co-founder [Mustafa Suleyman](/wiki/mustafa_suleyman) [6][28].

In January 2025, the FTC published a staff report on corporate partnerships between large cloud service providers (Alphabet, Amazon, and Microsoft) and AI developers, as part of a broader Section 6(b) study. The report explicitly referenced the Amazon-Adept and Microsoft-Inflection arrangements as examples of deals that raised competition concerns. The report noted that such partnerships may impact access to computing resources and engineering talent, increase switching costs, and provide cloud service provider partners with access to sensitive technical and business information [28].

U.S. Senator Ron Wyden (D-Oregon) also cited Amazon's deal with Adept in a letter to the FTC and Department of Justice, arguing that technology companies were licensing technology or making acqui-hires specifically to avoid antitrust scrutiny. As of March 2026, no formal enforcement action had been publicly announced in connection with the Amazon-Adept deal [27].

## Amazon AGI Lab and Nova Act

In December 2024, Amazon formally established the AGI Lab, a small research group based in San Francisco focused on "long-term research bets" in AI agent technology. David Luan was named to lead the lab as Vice President of Autonomy. Pieter Abbeel, a robotics researcher who had joined Amazon through a similar licensing-and-hiring deal with Covariant, worked closely with Luan's team [29][30].

The lab's first major release was [Amazon Nova](/wiki/amazon_nova) Act, an AI model and developer toolkit for building agents that can perform tasks autonomously in web browsers. Amazon unveiled Nova Act in preview form on March 31, 2025. The model was engineered to handle interface elements that commonly cause problems for AI agents, such as dropdown menus, date pickers, and popup dialogs. Amazon reported that Nova Act scored over 90% on internal evaluations of these challenging UI interactions and reached best-in-class performance on benchmarks including ScreenSpot and GroundUI Web. On ScreenSpot Web Text, Nova Act scored 94%, ahead of OpenAI's Computer-Using Agent (CUA) at 88% and Anthropic's Claude 3.7 Sonnet at 90% [31][32].

Nova Act drew a clear line from Adept's original vision of action models to Amazon's product ambitions. The technology was adopted by customers including Hertz, 1Password, and Amazon.com itself [31].

### Why did David Luan leave Amazon? (February 2026)

In February 2026, David Luan announced his departure from Amazon, less than two years after joining through the Adept acqui-hire. In a LinkedIn post, Luan said he was leaving "to cook up something new," adding that "with AGI so close, I decided to spend 100% of my time on teaching AI systems brand new capabilities" [33][34].

Luan's departure followed a major reorganization of Amazon's AGI division in late 2025, which placed the unit under Peter DeSantis, a 27-year Amazon veteran and Senior Vice President in Amazon Web Services. By the time of Luan's departure, four of the five Adept co-founders who had joined Amazon had already left the company [33][34].

## Models

| Model | Type | Parameters | Release Date | License | Key Features |
|-------|------|------------|--------------|---------|---------------|
| ACT-1 | Action model | Undisclosed | September 2022 | Proprietary | First action transformer; operated via Chrome extension; clicked, typed, scrolled in real software |
| Persimmon-8B | Text LLM | ~9.3B | September 2023 | Apache 2.0 | 16K context window; competitive with LLaMA 2 on 37% of the training data |
| Fuyu-8B | Multimodal | ~8B | October 2023 | CC-BY-NC | No image encoder; arbitrary image resolution; sub-100ms latency for large images |
| Fuyu-Heavy | Multimodal | Undisclosed | January 2024 | Proprietary | Third-most-capable multimodal model at launch; outperformed Gemini Pro on MMMU |
| ACT-2 | Action model | Undisclosed | 2024 | Proprietary | Fine-tuned from Fuyu family; powered Adept Workflows product; optimized for UI understanding |

## Funding History

| Round | Date | Amount | Lead Investors | Valuation | Key Details |
|-------|------|--------|---------------|-----------|-------------|
| Series A | April 2022 | $65 million | Greylock, Addition | Undisclosed | Came out of stealth; notable angels included Andrej Karpathy, Dara Khosrowshahi |
| Series B | March 2023 | $350 million | General Catalyst, Spark Capital | ~$1 billion | Achieved unicorn status; Microsoft and NVIDIA among investors |
| **Total** | | **~$415 million** | | | |

## Key People

| Name | Role at Adept | Background | Post-Adept |
|------|---------------|------------|------------|
| David Luan | Co-founder, CEO | VP of Engineering at OpenAI (2017-2020); Director at Google Brain | Led Amazon AGI Lab (2024-2026); departed February 2026 |
| Ashish Vaswani | Co-founder, Chief Scientist | Co-author of "Attention Is All You Need"; Google Brain | Left Adept in 2023; co-founded Essential AI |
| Niki Parmar | Co-founder, CTO | Co-author of "Attention Is All You Need"; Google Brain | Left Adept in 2023; co-founded Essential AI |
| Augustus Odena | Co-founder | Google Brain researcher | Joined Amazon (June 2024) |
| Maxwell Nye | Co-founder | AI researcher | Joined Amazon (June 2024) |
| Erich Elsen | Co-founder | AI researcher | Joined Amazon (June 2024) |
| Kelsey Szot | Co-founder | AI researcher | Joined Amazon (June 2024) |
| Zach Brock | CEO (post-Amazon deal) | Head of Engineering at Adept | Took over as CEO after co-founders departed |

## Significance and Legacy

Adept AI occupies a distinctive place in the history of the AI industry for several reasons.

First, Adept was one of the earliest companies to articulate and pursue the vision of AI agents that interact with software through the same interfaces humans use. While [ChatGPT](/wiki/chatgpt) and other chatbots captured public attention, Adept was building models that could click buttons, fill forms, and navigate applications. This "action model" approach anticipated the broader industry shift toward AI agents that began in earnest in 2024 and 2025, when companies like [OpenAI](/wiki/openai), [Google](/wiki/google), [Anthropic](/wiki/anthropic), and Amazon all invested heavily in agentic AI capabilities.

Second, Adept's open-source contributions, particularly Persimmon-8B and Fuyu-8B, advanced the state of multimodal AI research. Fuyu-8B's simplified architecture, which eliminated the need for a separate image encoder, influenced subsequent work on vision-language models and demonstrated that competitive multimodal performance could be achieved with more streamlined designs.

Third, the Amazon acqui-hire became a landmark case in the debate over how large technology companies acquire AI talent. Alongside Microsoft's deal with Inflection AI, the Adept deal prompted regulatory scrutiny and legislative attention. The FTC's investigation and subsequent Section 6(b) report helped establish a framework for evaluating whether talent acquisitions and licensing deals are effectively acquisitions in disguise. These cases influenced how regulators approach similar transactions across the AI industry.

Finally, Adept's story illustrates the challenges facing well-funded AI startups competing against technology giants with vastly larger resources. Despite raising $415 million, Adept ultimately found that the costs of training frontier AI models and competing for talent against companies like Amazon, Google, and Microsoft were prohibitive. The acqui-hire pattern that consumed Adept was not unique; it reflected a broader dynamic in which several promising AI startups were effectively absorbed by incumbent technology companies during 2023 and 2024 [35].

## Current Status

As of early 2026, Adept continues to operate as an independent company under CEO Zach Brock with approximately 20 employees. The company has shifted its focus from training foundation models to building solutions that enable agentic AI, leveraging its existing models, agentic data, web interaction software, and custom infrastructure. Adept works with partners to bring agentic capabilities to their products rather than competing directly as a model provider [25][26].

Amazon continues to develop the AI agent technology that originated at Adept through the Nova Act product line and its broader AGI division [31].

## References

1. "AI Transformer Inventors Launch Adept with $65M to Lend a Hand to Knowledge Workers." BusinessWire, April 26, 2022.
2. "Adept aims to build AI that can automate any software process." TechCrunch, April 26, 2022.
3. "Adept, a startup training AI to use existing software and APIs, raises $350M." TechCrunch, March 15, 2023.
4. "Announcing our Series B." Adept AI Blog, March 14, 2023.
5. "Amazon beefs up AI development, hiring execs from startup Adept and licensing its technology." CNBC, June 28, 2024.
6. "Amazon's deal with AI startup Adept faces FTC scrutiny." CNBC, July 16, 2024.
7. "Ex-Googlers to build 'general intelligence' at Adept AI." The Register, April 27, 2022.
8. "Product-Led AI: Adept CEO David Luan on Upleveling Human Work." Adept AI Media, March 24, 2024.
9. "ACT-1: Transformer for Actions." Adept AI Blog, September 14, 2022.
10. "Meet Adept's ACT-1: An AI Assistant That Can Browse, Search and Use Web Apps As Humans Do." MarkTechPost, September 19, 2022.
11. "Two Co-Founders of Adept, an OpenAI Rival, Suddenly Left to Start Another Company." The Information, 2023.
12. "Ashish Vaswani." Wikipedia.
13. "Adept announces $350M of new capital." Adept AI Press Release, March 14, 2023.
14. "Releasing Persimmon-8B." Adept AI Blog, September 7, 2023.
15. "Adept AI Labs Open-Sources Persimmon-8B: A Powerful Fully Permissively-Licensed Language Model." MarkTechPost, September 9, 2023.
16. "Fuyu-8B: A Multimodal Architecture for AI Agents." Adept AI Blog, October 17, 2023.
17. "Adept AI Open-Sources Fuyu-8B: A Multimodal Architecture for Artificial Intelligence Agents." MarkTechPost, October 27, 2023.
18. "Adept Fuyu-Heavy: A new multimodal model." Adept AI Blog, January 2024.
19. "Adept AI Introduces Fuyu-Heavy: A New Multimodal Model Designed Specifically for Digital Agents." MarkTechPost, January 27, 2024.
20. "Introducing Adept Experiments." Adept AI Blog.
21. "Building Powerful Agents with Adept." Adept AI Blog.
22. "Amazon hires founders away from AI startup Adept." TechCrunch, June 28, 2024.
23. "Amazon hires founders from well-funded enterprise AI startup Adept to boost tech giant's 'AGI' team." GeekWire, June 28, 2024.
24. "Investors in Adept AI will be paid back after Amazon hires startup's top talent." Semafor, August 2, 2024.
25. "An update from Adept." Adept AI Blog, 2024.
26. "Adept's AI Licensing Deal with Amazon and Leadership Changes." CTOL Digital Solutions, 2024.
27. "Letter to FTC and DOJ on AI competition." U.S. Senator Ron Wyden, 2024.
28. "Behind the FTC's 6(b) Report on Large AI Partnerships & Investments." Federal Trade Commission, January 2025.
29. "Amazon forms a new AI agent-focused lab led by Adept's co-founder." TechCrunch, December 9, 2024.
30. "Amazon opens new AI lab in San Francisco focused on long-term research bets." Amazon Science, December 2024.
31. "Introducing Amazon Nova Act." Amazon Science, March 31, 2025.
32. "Amazon unveils Nova Act, an AI agent that can control a web browser." TechCrunch, March 31, 2025.
33. "Head of Amazon's AGI lab is leaving in latest exit from high-profile Adept startup deal." GeekWire, February 2026.
34. "Head of Amazon's AGI lab is leaving the company." CNBC, February 24, 2026.
35. "FTC Staff Report on AI Partnerships & Investments 6(b) Study." Federal Trade Commission, January 2025.