• AutoTL;DR@lemmings.worldB
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    5 months ago

    This is the best summary I could come up with:


    A couple of months ago, I was sitting in the audience at a tech conference in San Fransisco watching Bloomberg’s Emily Chang interview Reid Hoffman.

    Not only had Microsoft (where Hoffman is a board member) hired most of Inflection’s employees — it also licensed the startup’s technology in a way that seemed designed to make its investors whole.

    Last Friday, Amazon announced that it is hiring most of the team behind Adept, another would-be OpenAI competitor that raised about $400 million from top-tier investors to build, in the words of CEO David Luan, “a new type of giant model that turns natural language into actions on your machine.”

    In an internal memo published by GeekWire’s Taylor Soper, SVP Rohit Prasad said that, like Microsoft with Inflection, Amazon will also be licensing Adept’s technology to “accelerate our roadmap for building digital agents that can automate software workflows.”

    Adept’s corporate blog post about the news suggests it was running out of money: “Continuing with Adept’s initial plan of building both useful general intelligence and an enterprise agent product would’ve required spending significant attention on fundraising for our foundation models, rather than bringing to life our agent vision.” Recent reports say the company has been looking to sell itself.

    Reid Hoffman, meanwhile, should probably be congratulated for more than just an accurate prediction about the future of these deals — one of Adept’s earliest investors was none other than his venture capital firm, Greylock.


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