David Luan, Amazon’s AI Lab lead, who joined after his co-founded startup Adept was acquired by the retail large is leaving his place as the corporate’s Vice President, Brokers and Head of the San Francisco synthetic intelligence lab, simply two years later. He made the announcement in a submit on skilled social networking platform LinkedIn, earlier right now.
“I’ll be leaving Amazon on the finish of this week to cook dinner up one thing new,” Luan wrote, including: “Because of the Adept deal, I’ve spent the final ~2 years studying from Andy Jassy, Peter Desantis, Matt Garman, and Rohit Prasad whereas main Amazon’s brokers R&D effort and our San Francisco AI lab. As a childhood AWS fanboy, it was unimaginable to speedrun launching our personal tier-1 AWS service.”
David Luan’s achievements in AI for Amazon
Itemizing out the assorted targets achieved at Amazon, Luan mentioned that the AI lab “scaled up the agent coaching recipes we invented at Adept, did new RL analysis, and put the tech within the fingers of AWS prospects like Hertz, 1Password, and Amazon.com itself”.
He additionally introduced that Peter Desantis, SVP of utility computing merchandise at AWS who has spent 27 years on the large, will take over his position: “Because the underdog, seeing Nova Act on the high of agent analysis leaderboards like REALBench is fairly satisfying. The group can be in nice fingers with Peter Desantis from right here.”
Why did David Luan go away Amazon?
Luan in his submit defined that whereas there is “unimaginable work to be achieved at Amazon and alternatives for me to tackle extra areas”, he believes that with AGI “so shut”, focusing “100% of my time on instructing AI techniques model new capabilities” is vital.
“This wasn’t a simple resolution, and I am unhappy to depart this glorious group. I’m grateful for the belief our execs positioned in me throughout an vital second for Amazon and the sector. I am excited to swing on the subsequent thought!” he added.
Who is David Luan? All we find out about Adept cofounder
Luan is the top of Amazon’s Brokers and AI lab groups based mostly in San Francisco, which was created in December 2024 to work on long-term analysis bets. He joined the retail and tech main in 2024, together with the founding group of Adept, by Amazon’s acquisition of the AI startup, CNBC reported.
Among the many lab’s merchandise embody Nova Act agent, unveiled in March 2025, which competes with ChatGPT (OpenAI), Claude (Anthropic), and Gemini (Google). It is an AI mannequin and developer toolkit for constructing brokers that may carry out duties autonomously in internet browsers, as per a Geekwire report.
Previous to Amazon (joined June 2024) and Adept (January 2022-December 2024, Luan’s LinkedIn profile exhibits he his different main roles had been:
- On the Influence Advisory Committee at Apollo World Administration (January 2021-December 2022);
- A Director at Google Analysis (September 2020-November 2021);
- VP of Engineering at OpenAI (December 2017-September 2020);
- Director of AI at Axion (February 2017-November 2017);
- And CEO of Dextro (October 2011-November 2017).
Based on his web site, Luan holds “a certificates in CS from Worcester State from after I was 12, and a BS/BA in Utilized Math and Political Science from Yale”.
His most important focus is analysis, however his profession “has revolved round near- and long-term impacts of AI on society”, it added. “I am enthusiastic about how the dynamics of AI improvement can form outcomes for individuals, and I attempt to spend as a lot time as potential with ethics, security, and coverage researchers,” it mentioned.
David Luan joins different Adept co-founders in leaving Amazon
Notably, his departure comes after Amazon introduced main reorganisation of its AGI division, into its AWS Cloud division final 12 months, CNBC added.
Spokespeople for Amazon declined to remark, in keeping with the report.
The Geekwire report additional famous that Luan is not the primary Adept co-founder who joined Amazon underneath the so-called “acqui-deal” to depart. Different co-founders have additionally moved to totally different roles throughout the trade:
- Erich Elsen resigned after 4 months and is now a principal analysis scientist at Databricks.
- Augustus Odena and Maxwell Nye each left after a few 12 months and are now analysis scientists at Meta.
Earlier than founding Adept in 2022, Luan ran analysis and engineering at OpenAI for 3 years and led Google’s massive language mannequin effort. In his departure submit, he described his profession as a sequence of early bets, together with incubating the primary GPTs at OpenAI, and going all-in on brokers at Adept earlier than others.
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